


What Will We Do With A Drunken Drabble?

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Drabble Collection, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-25
Updated: 2013-11-07
Packaged: 2017-11-17 00:30:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 40
Words: 20,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of sundry Dishonored drabbles. Each chapter will have a short summary, pairing, and rating/warnings in the notes. Tags updated as I go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Baisemain (Piero/Ceceilia, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Piero/Cecelia, G. Written for gatsbygal on Tumblr for the prompt "baisemain - a kiss on the hand"

They are alike, a little, in that they are not noticed. Or at least this is what Cecelia tells herself. Sweeping up at the end of the shift that was supposed to be Lydia’s, she makes up lists of _reasons why_ to keep her mind from dwelling on rats and shadows and the gnaw of hunger in her bones.

They both lean forward with wanting. They are both thin, and their clothes hang a little loose on them, and neither of them seems to notice or mind. Their eyes both like to find the skyline and horizon. They take their tea the same.

Even their hands are the same, or near enough that it does not matter. Narrow. Worked. Hers are rubbed raw from washing, soapscum under her fingernails. His are covered with grease or tar or dust of copper, always busy. Their fingers both turn red from the cold in the mornings. It gets stiff in their bones. She knows this, because she brings him his tea some mornings, because he takes it the same as she.

(Each morning she asks if he has slept. Each morning he answers _no_ ).

The cold gets worse as winter falls, and Piero complains in the mornings when his fingers falter and slip on his work (and springs uncoil, and things explode, and crossbow bolts go flying around the room - Cecelia ducks behind the workbench, listening to Lydia outside _shriek_ like a little girl). It is not a week later when she finds a pair of gloves abandoned in the washing. They are old, and there is a hole in the left, but the tips of the fingers are cut away to allow for delicate work and they are exactly his size. And warm. She cleans them, carefully, darns the hole, and she brings them to him next morning with the tea.

And this is where Cecelia is wrong. This is where they are not alike.

She may not be much of a lady, ever, but there is a faint shade of a gentleman in Piero. And the hand that takes hers is not clean (but neither is hers), but it is warm from the mug of tea she’s just brought. The kiss on the back of her hand is short and not sanitary and just a little _absurd_ , just a little lovely, and the _thank you_ he gives her is innocent and honest - and Cecelia finds herself suddenly turning on her heel and ducking back outside, arms wrapped tight around herself, blush burning underneath her freckles and all her words and lists of ways they are alike forgotten.

(They may be the two people who are looked down on and unnoticed, but that does not mean they cannot notice each other)


	2. Cagamosis (Sokolov, G)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sokolov/OC, G. Written for thespookyamazon on Tumblr for the prompt "cagamosis - an unhappy marriage."

She wonders if any of his admirerers and patrons in distant Dunwall know that he has a wife back in Tyvia. She reads the papers in the morning, black coffee steaming in the cold air, and learns to read between the lines.

He is a genius, they say. Painter. Philosopher. Scholar. Those who come to his house to let him use their bodies for experiments are all women. His favorite painting he has ever created is one of a woman in white, curves like an hourglass, with a face too beautiful to be seen. It does not matter, say the papers. He is a genius. He is a great man.

_He is a great man._

It is what the other wives on the street say, too, when the checks come quietly each month (handed through a third party so that they cannot be traced, of course; she doubts his  _mistresses_  would approve of a shrinking Tyvian wife back home). He sends her enough money to keep her fed. And more. It is enough to keep her fed, and warm, and clothed, and quiet. 

She spends the money on coffee and firewood and thick coats to keep out the chill in a too-large empty house, curls up and reads the paper, and reads of a _great man_  in a distant city named Dunwall who has learned to pull sorrow from the sea and turn it into war. It is, she thinks, appropriate. Anton knows nothing of sorrow. She keeps it all for him, and so he keeps her far away.

She wonders if he ever thinks of her.

In her dreams, he paints her. Ardently. Passionately. And when she steps around to look at the canvas she finds that she is slightly out of frame; that the face of the woman is not quite hers, that the sea behind her is blue and southern, that she has been replaced by a thousand other women and a city that she will never see.


	3. Broken Glass (Lydia & Treavor Pendleton, G)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lydia & Treavor Pendleton, G. Written for gatsbygal on Tumblr, who requested Lydia worrying about Pendleton's alcoholism.

Every week, when Lydia goes to take out the garbage, there are more bottles. Brown and green and clear glass, wide and thin, broken and whole. Most of them are small to fit in inside pockets or be tucked quietly under the table. The labels are all so expensive.

“He should start throwing them into the sea if he wants people to respect him,” she tells Cecelia.

“He should  _stop drinking_  if he wants people to respect him,” the woman retorts, sharp (and she goes to tidy up Piero’s workspace, again). 

“He should stop buying such expensive booze,” she complains to Wallace, later. “He’s pouring his money down his throat.” 

The man glares at her as if she’s bleeding from the eyes. “It’s not your place to judge him,” he snaps (and sweeps off to follow his master like a dog).

He’s right, Lydia thinks bitterly. It’s not her place. He is a nobleman, born and bred, one of the noble brats she’s supposed to hate so much. She is only a servant. 

She thinks of snatching the bottles out of his hand and shattering them on the ground, breaking glass, fume of liquor on the air. She thinks of slapping him across the face to make him  _listen_. It would take something like that to startle him out of thinking about himself. The sound would be loud as a gunshot.  _Stop worrying about what other people think of you,_  she’d hiss at him.  _Stop scurrying around trying to prove yourself. You don’t have to. Dammit, stop sniveling. It makes you look like scum._

(But she is the scum in this equation, naturally, and all she can do is glare at him as the sunlight catches on the ugly brown glass of a fresh-opened bottle and he steadily, quietly, drinks his money and his shame and his self-worth away).


	4. Wanweird (The Heart, G)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Heart (Corvo Attano/Jessamine Kaldwin), G. Written for an Anon on Tumblr for the prompt "wanweird - an unhappy fate."

The worst is what he does not show her. 

There are other things, yes. Pain, bright and constant,  _physical_  in a way that should be impossible: gears that pull and grind, staples that bite, metal lacing through that grows bitter in the cold. Electricity that gnaws through her unceasing. The memory of gravedirt sifting down, the slice of chilled flesh and _snap_  of breaking bones, hand reaching up and in to tear her out of the dark chambers of her ribs.  _What has been done to her._

But the worst is the way she can sense the pull and ebb of life all around her, all the todays and tomorrows spiraling out in a spider’s web - and she can sense them snuff themselves out and  _end_. One by one. She can sense the fire of another man’s heart before her and the futures it holds, the possibilities, so many: the tomorrows where he is clever or cruel, wicked or drunk, sober or childless, loved or adored, the tomorrows where he is  _dead -_

It is dead. Always. 

The blade always stabs through the heart. She knows how that feels. She knows so well.

The man who carries her so carefully leaves no survivors.

The hand that once held her so close and now holds her close again is always filthy with blood.

He makes her look at so many things, hunger and plague and corruption, turns her like a compass toward the things that made her weep in life. Clutches her tight in bloody hands and carries her through a city grown wretched and wracked with weeping, asking her to shed light on all the darkest corners.

All but one.

He does not let her look at him.


	5. Sea-change (Piero & Callista, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Piero & Callista, G. Written for an Anon on Tumblr.

Callista has forgiven him the eyes in the keyhole. It was not about her, she understands. Or even her body. Not more than a little; not  _truly_. It was about pressing a hand flat against the door because there was another person on the other side, a person of flesh and bone and beating heart, and as long as they did not know you were  _looking_  you could wonder at them without seeing the judgement in their eyes.

She knows that Piero is judged. She knows he does not sleep. His inventions are mad, and this makes others think him mad as well - and he is, a little, mad and awkward and lonely. So very, very lonely.

She has forgiven him, because she knows what this is like. She knows what it’s like for the face in the mirror and the face in one’s dreams to not precisely match.

(In her dreams the deck of a whaling ship pitches under her, and the scent of the sea is rich and bitter and strong. Her hair is short as a boy’s and the wind burns her cheeks red and the ropes sing in her hands. And the beasts they pull from the deep are wonderful and strange. In her dreams, the songs that they sing as they die are the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard).

She has forgiven him, because of this:

She slips her way inside his workshop one night after Emily has gone to bed. The lights are on and Piero is working, and the blue light from whale-oil lamps does little to dispel his image of a madman. It carves out hollows in his face, wakes the loneliness in his eyes. Callista does not mind. She stands there until his hands still, and until he looks up.

In her hands she holds one of his books, a treatise on the leviathans of the deep. Rich and wonderful and strange.

“Tell me about the whales.”


	6. Autolatry I (Treavor Pendleton & Corvo, T)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Treavor Pendleton & Corvo Attano, T. Written for alucifer on Tumblr for the prompt "autolatry - self-worship"

If he were any other man, Treavor thinks, he would not expect Corvo to turn around. He would expect the jab to slide off the man like the rainwater oozing down the windows of the lighthouse. But he is not just any man. He does not hurl insults like rocks, unaimed, unplanned. He is  _Treavor Pendleton_ , and he has spent his life moving snakelike through the mazes of aristocracy and politics and conspiracy and watching the glint in his elder brothers’ eyes to tell when the next blow would fall. He is a small man in many ways, but all his skill lies in his tongue. He knows how to read men. He knows, small thing that he is, to worm under their skin. He knows how to shatter them with a word.

He is Treavor Pendleton and this is  _Corvo Attano_ , the man who has no skill in his tongue at all and who any fool can read like a book, and so it is no surprise to him at all when Corvo stops dead as if he’s been stopped by a physical door.

(Words  _are_  doors, Treavor has learned; they can slam in people’s faces like this, so satisfying, and the proper ones let you into such  _useful_  places. He has spent his life collecting the keys)

No, he is not surprised when Corvo turns around.

He is not even surprised when the man’s feet splash through the slurry of water and blood on the floor and he bends down, lifts up his mask, looks him in the eye with no metal between them and the muzzle of his pistol pressed against Treavor’s left cheekbone.

He is only surprised that the steel of the pistol is so bloody  _cold_.

“Say that again,” says Corvo.

(Flat. Blunt. Ineloquent. Brutish).

It occurs to Treavor, quite suddenly, that if he opens his mouth the words he speaks are like to be his  _last_ ; and this is a horribly unfitting way to die, really, alone in a miserable tower with freezing rainwater soaking his suit and blood soaking in beneath it. The fear of that and the gun and the (so horribly  _unsubtle_ ) man before him is almost sharp enough to bite through the pain of the bullet between his ribs. He eyes the silver of the gun in the corner of his vision and speaks quickly. Stalling. “S-so what was it you wanted? The money? The wo-“

The gun bruises  _cold_  against his cheekbone as it presses his head back and the click of the bolt setting is  _horrific_  and, and, he is  _Treavor Pendleton_  and this isn’t  _fitting_  (except it is), he is a snake and an excellent liar and he is  _not_  the kind of man who should be held at gunpoint by someone who has never lied in his life, this is not the way he was supposed to die -

And the fear in the pit of his stomach gnaws at him like it did when he was a boy.

He is  _Treavor Pendleton._

He is not supposed to die this way; therefore, he will not. He can talk his way out of this; therefore, he will.

(He can see no way to talk his way out of the gun pressed to his cheek besides giving Corvo what he wants; therefore:)

His tongue passes out over his lips, and the breath he draws is not his last. “I said you were screwing the Empress. Everyone knows you were screwing the Empress.”

“Screwing.”

(The word is not a key. It does not open doors. It is not expertly wielded. It is like the gun; it serves no purpose but  _force_ )

“Yes.”

“That word.”

“Yes.” 

He picked the word very carefully. He’s only sorry he didn’t say  _fucking_.

Corvo stares him down, the righteous fury in his face so easy to read, child’s play, and the fear gnaws and gnaws in Treavor’s stomach like rats; but he is good at reading people. Ever so good. And what he reads in the other man’s eyes is  _not worth it._

_Pathetic._

(He agrees. He can never agree. He is  _Treavor Pendleton_ ).

Corvo steps away, and the mask falls back into place (not that it does him any good), and Treavor breathes a sigh of relief now that the only cold biting at him is the cold of bullet and water and wind. He watches the man step away. Watches him lower the gun and raise his left hand, empty, free.

And then -

(And  _this is not the way that he should die -!_ )

And then the rats come.


	7. Autolatry II (Sokolov, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sokolov, G. Written for hipalbatross on Tumblr for the prompt "autolatry - self-worship"

It is not long before he hates them all.

It feels like the hatred is almost  _expected_  of him, which of course only further infuriates him to no end. He is, after all, a genius; the very definition of  _genius_  is one who does not fall into predetermined patterns. It is apparently the pattern of a genius to scorn and condemn the men he works for. He scorns and condemns the fact that the pattern is so. It is a paradox.

(This is a small comfort. He loves paradoxes).

He progresses, through the months and years, from hating his clients to hating the city to hating just about  _everything_. The city is cold in every way. It is  _bitter_ cold, but not beautiful like the cities of Tyvia; it has no color and no snow, just grey and salt and ugly lines. Its food is horrific (even the liquor; especially the liquor) and its people are worse. Its people do not appreciate the eloquence of his designs. He makes them brilliant beautiful machines that can startle and shock a man into dust as fine and Tyvian snow, outline the contours of his bones, frame him in blue fire as brilliant as the Void; he gives them soldiers with legs like delicate insects and gates made of living light - and they see only the _murder_.

Imbeciles.

He makes a brilliant remedy for the plague that men say is animalistic, crude, that is mass-produced and sold on the black market.

Idiots.

He works his hatred into the titles of his paintings. He couches it in long phrases and eloquence and names that mean nothing. He paints the portrait of the Regent, and the High Overseer, and more, and he bows and scrapes to their will as geniuses should never bow, and the name he scrawls in the corner of the painting is just a long and verbose way of saying  _hate hate hate hate hate._

He is better than this.

He is so,  _so_  much better than this. 

Alone in his bridge-top-tower workshops, he creates a painting to illustrate this, one for him and him alone: a man who appears out of the Void of invention with hands spread wide to offer gifts, with shadows in his face, who is just about to step free of the frame.

 _I am better than all of this,_  he says with each brushstroke.  _I hate all of them. You recognize this. You can sympathize. We are alike. I deserve this. Why won’t you come to me?_


	8. Basorexia (Corvo/Jessamine, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo Attano/Jessamine Kaldwin, G. Written for an Anon on Tumblr for the prompt "basorexia - an overwhelming desire to kiss."

The alarms are blaring and the guards are milling around like mad and there is a spatter of blood in the hall that someone will have to clean up, and it is his fault and not his fault, and Corvo cares about none of it. He sheathes his sword. The motion is professional. The lines of his body are stiff. They have to be.

 _They_  have to be.

She is standing back against the bookcases and her eyes are wide, and her face is white and bloodless. Her lips are pale. She is  _safe:_ the assassin never even got close to her. And he wants nothing more than to take her in his arms and kiss all the color back into her mouth and assure himself that she is real and solid and whole.

(He is being romantic again. He is being slightly ridiculous. She would likely roll her eyes if she knew, except she  _wouldn’t_ )

(the guards are  _everywhere_ )

(they have to be  _professional_ )

“Well,” Jessamine manages, and her back is held stiff by the bookcase behind her, “that was…” Her throat works and her eyes slide off him for barely an instant and land on the dead man behind him. “Lively.”

Corvo  _winces_  and she cracks a brittle-edged smile.

She does not  _thank_  him, not precisely, not with so many words or at least not now, because this is his job and there is all this language of duty and place and professionalism that gets in the way of what she actually wants to say. It is an understanding between them. She is lovely and stiff-spined and frightened, collected and pale, slightly rumpled from chaos - the pin holding her collar closed is emerald, bright, and it is slightly crooked. The mask is slightly out of place. Unprofessional.

And this is an  _understanding_ , too: that when Corvo reaches out and straightens the pin at the hollow of her throat and sets it right to nestle against her pulse, what he is  _really_  doing is taking her in his arms and kissing  _you are safe, you are safe_  into her for all the guards around them to see.


	9. Petrichor (Corvo & Emily, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo Attano & Emily Kaldwin, G. Written for theundeadscout on Tumblr for the prompt "petrichor - the smell of damp earth after rain"

Corvo is finding it more and more difficult to sleep these days, what with the dreams of blood on his hands and the black-eyed man who makes him leap from idea to shifting perilous idea; what with the way his bones are stiff and how he wakes to find that he’s tossed and turned in the night and woken all the complaints of Coldridge in his body.

Emily, apparently, isn’t sleeping either. 

It worries him. She tells him her dreams, and they worry him more. But not tonight. It is not nightmares that drive her into his room - it’s the sound of rain beating on the metal roof like angry fists on a door. She comes creeping in with eyes wide, and she mumbles an excuse - and then  _jumps_  when lightning arcs white across the sky and gives a sheepish grin that he can’t help but echo, a little.

No sleep, then.

It’s not like he minds. Not at all. Not for the world.

He sets a lantern on the floor and they sit beside it (across from each other, at first, and then her head winds up leaning against his shoulder), and they tell stories. Happier ones. They are not stories of  _happier times,_  because he doesn’t need to see the faint hollow look in her eyes: they are tales of adventure and whaling ships and the wide open Pandyssian skies where anything is possible and where magic flows like water. They are tales of things he has done, or has not done, or could, or never. It does not matter. Emily echos and adds and expands on him, hands moving in excitement to make the shape of stories in the air. They throw shadows on the wall. Monsters and demons and magic. Larger than any shadows cast by the lightning outside.

They talk until it is many, many hours past her bedtime and she’s fallen asleep with her head tucked against his shoulder. Careful, Corvo tucks her into his own bed. It is not like he will need it. It is not like he minds at all.

(In the morning the lightning will be gone, and Emily will run to breakfast and babble to Callista about the tales they made up in the dark. The world will be bright and fresh and new. Clean light, the debris from the sea all washed away and redistributed, the smell of earth made over and small green things creeping up from the soil. In the morning, Corvo will ask her if she had any nightmares. And she will answer  _no_.)


	10. New Leaf (Corvo & Daud, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo & Daud, G. Postgame.

It begins a year or three after Emily has taken the throne. Every year, on the anniversary of her coronation, Corvo receives a bottle of wine in the mail. Just one. The label is from a tiny vineyard on the shores of Serkonos.

It is not a part of his once-native country that he has ever visited. He has to check a travelogue to learn that it is a place of white cliffs that drop into a blue sea, green hills, and white gulls whose wings carve sickle-patterns in the air. Their screams are nothing like the screams of dying men.

It must cost a slightly ridiculous sum to ship a single bottle of wine to Dunwall from Serkonos. This is not lost on him.

The wine, in the first years, is very bad. It gets better by degrees. By the time Emily is old enough to stand at Jessamine’s height and make Corvo see shadows whenever he looks at her, the wine is decent and edging on  _good_. The label remains small and unknown, but this is  _right_. The vineyard is the work of a single man. He imagines him with the Serkonin sun catching silver in his hair (there would be silver in his hair, by now; there is silver in Corvo’s), walking between rows of grapes where the leaves whisper like ghosts. The juice that stains his hands and gets under his fingernails is nothing so red as blood.

The image, like the wine in those first years, is  _bitter_.

He does not deserve it.

But then, none of them deserve it.

There is no letter that comes with the bottle, never; or rather, nothing  _proper._ No words. No _thank you,_  though the sentiment is doubtless there. Nothing bold or crass or wheedling enough to make Corvo burn such a letter and break the bottle on the floor (as he did the first year and nearly wanted to do the second). Just a small note folded many times over that contains only a sketched-out copy of the mark they both bear. The same, every year.

It does not precisely say  _we are alike_. That would be too obvious. That would be too bitter for Corvo to accept as true.

It is something more like  _I exist._

_We exist._

_We who have been branded murderers or monsters, we can do this._

Corvo drinks the wine alone, each year, quietly, and the candlelight shines through the dark in his glass and casts a flickering light-shadow on the unfolded mark on the table. The shadow is red; and it moves like the sea moves below a far-away vineyard in Serkonos where the waves break white upon each new day.

Someday, he thinks, he will share it with Emily. Someday he will tell her who it comes from.


	11. Precipice (Corvo/Outsider, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo Attano/The Outsider, G. Written for urdnotkassa on Tumblr.

He finds the charm in a room where there are no corpses, just old blood on the floor and white letters reading  _The Outsider is a liar_  scrawled all over the wall. The air prickles; the sound of the sea outside catches, redoubles, stutters upon itself for a moment before returning to the slow rise and fall like breath. When Corvo turns he is not surprised to see him sitting in the open window.

He says nothing. He beckons.

And when Corvo tries to drop the charm in his hand the Outsider catches hold of him, fingers curling around his own and holding him fast. Drawing him close. He holds the bit of bone between them, plays it over his fingers; he seems to enjoy the way it is so bleach-coral white against their coats, the void of Corvo’s mask, the lack of light in the little room.

“This is the bone from under the socket of the left eye,” he murmurs. The hand not holding the charm slips up and touches the same spot on Corvo’s face, the mask, the metal bone that  _isn’t_. Just under the eye that is all gears and clockwork. Light. “It was still alive when they started to cut. The knives went dark.”

Fingertip tracing down the cheekbone of the mask, over the cheekbone inside the mask, and Corvo finds himself licking dry lips and wondering if the Outsider can see.

“The man who carved this prayed to me and asked me never to acknowledge him,” continues the Outsider. “Human minds can be such funny things.”

His eyes are dark as bloodstains on the walls, and the open window behind him is empty and free and frames him with empty air. The sea behind him is wide, wide. Corvo thinks of the sailor clutching the charm to his heart in terror as the deck of the ship under him pitched in a blood-dark storm; and he cannot (as the Outsider’s fingers cup the curve of the side of his face, and he cannot feel and can feel them  _perfectly_ ), he  _cannot_  shake the image that the sailor’s face is his own.

“Did you answer his prayer?” he asks, catch in his throat.

“Ah, my dear.” Fingers curl around and find the cloth in the seam of his mask, reach between wire teeth and touch light against his lips. “You know that I only give men what they ask for.”

The taste through the fabric is salt, sea or sweat, he cannot tell, and the fingers trace the line of his lips and Corvo cannot speak.  _If I pushed you right now,_  he thinks, eyes on the man and not the empty air behind him,  _would you fall?_

The bone is white. The  _liar_  on the wall is white. The eyes of the man are dark, dark, and his fingers dance soft and the answering chuckle catches in his mind like a riptide and drags under.

_Only you, dear Corvo. Only you._


	12. An Unfortunate Lack of Poetic Justice (and Pants) [CRACK, G]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo & Daud & Treavor Pendle- who am I kidding, this is utter crack. G.
> 
> meaghkan on tumblr created a Treavor Pendleton paper doll (see [here](http://meagkhan.tumblr.com/post/35441865406/dumb-pendleton-paper-doll-i-recommend-using) and [here](http://meagkhan.tumblr.com/post/35448864512/more-clothes-for-the-treavor-doll-a-pdf-for-your)). The rest is self-explanatory. I'm sorry.

The tiles of the roof were very, very cold, and Corvo was being very, very careful not to look at the other (also very cold, also very naked) assassin who was sitting next to him. Sitting, just sitting. Peacefully. Grumbling quietly. That was all.

(Corvo was very well-versed in poetic justice. This was not the time for it. This would not be  _poetic_. He was perfectly content, though not happy, to sit. Throttling the man in righteous vengeance for Jessamine’s death would have to wait until they were both wearing  _pants_.)

The two of them sat on the roof and listened to the distant sounds of barking hounds and a stampede of angry Overseers shouting about burning witches.

Or burning things to keep warm.

It was hard to tell, really.

“So I know I said I was done with killing,” said Daud after a long, long moment. “But if I get to him first -“

“Hound Pits Pub,” said Corvo. “Room’s on the second floor. Drunk and in bed before midnight.”

“Thanks.” A pause, slightly shorter, still monstrously uncomfortable. “That’s on the other side of the city, isn’t it.”

“Yup.”

Neither man moved. In the distance, the Overseers continued to shout about the sins of nudity, and Treavor Pendleton (presumably) continued to play dress-up for the rest of his very short existence.


	13. Spark (Sokolov & Piero, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sokolov & Piero, G.

“No,” Sokolov grumbles for the fifth or fiftieth time that night. His voice is all the solid and put-upon tones of someone who is used to being right, but the sharp note is little more than annoyance. It is, after all,  _very_  late; and the blueprints that he’s scrawling all over are very complicated and only becoming moreso. It’s likely that neither of them will sleep tonight.

If he’s entirely honest, he doesn’t mind in the  _slightest_.

He begins, again, to make chickenscratch notes and modifications all over Piero’s work. He utterly ignores the squawk of protest from the man upstairs.

“No,” Sokolov repeats. “We will have to scrap all this work.  _Again_. You  _cannot_ modulate the current enough to keep it from being fatal. You would need -“

“A delicate balance of two different humors of oil -“

 _Scritch-scratch_  as the pen stops. Sokolov sucks on his lower lip for a moment. “Three,” he concedes, smile tugging at his mouth. “Or more.”

“Hm, yes, three. Perhaps six?” Something clatters upstairs. Hopefully nothing is broken. “And of course that would require a corresponding lowering of the compression ratio so as to not aggravate the varying -” Piero’s head pokes over the upper railing. “Write this down.”

“I do not  _need_  to write this down,” complains Sokolov agreeably, as he continues to improve and amend Piero’s notes. “I  _know_  electricity. Perhaps you have seen my inventions walking around on spindly legs or frying men at checkpoints, yes?”

“You like to think you were the only one at the Academy. I studied electricity too. I invented -“

“Yes, I  _know_.”

“What?”

“Callista. The blonde. She told me all about your special chair. She showed me the blueprints. She was quite horrified.”

The clatter from upstairs is significantly louder than before. Something is definitely broken. At least it has not  _exploded_.

Yet.

“…A delicate balance of at least three differing humors of oil, adding the most volatile to the compression chamber  _last_  and thereby reducing the need to add a water coolant and further complicate the mechanism -” Sokolov hears the muttering cut off as Piero’s mouth snaps shut like a trap. He raises his eyebrows and quietly writes down everything the man has just said, nodding appreciatively and waiting for what he knows is coming. Piero clears his throat. “I think she wanted to see the blueprints. Or at least she didn’t say no when I offered.”

“What you have just said? That is brilliant.”

“…And?”

“And you have  _no_  idea how to talk to women.”

A long and incomprehensible and self-berating string of muttering from upstairs. “I can talk to them just fine,” Piero sighs at legnth. “It’s getting them to stay and listen that’s…nevermind.”

“Piero. You do not get a beautiful blonde to go to bed with you by telling her all about the sex chair you have invented.” Sokolov pauses. Considers. “Unless, perhaps, you are me.”

 _This_  time, something explodes.


	14. Five times Corvo used the Heart and regretted it (Corvo, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo & the Heart, G.

I.

_The one who walks here is all things. Cradle-songs of comfort and bones gnawed by teeth._

When Corvo was small, he would often fall asleep to the sound of waves on soft sand and his mother singing a song of how the moon and the sea were lovers. What disturbs him, now, is not the fact that this song may have contained a thread of love for the Outsider. It’s the thought that the Outsider was  _always watching._

II.

_Samuel Beechworth went to sea to escape a hopeless love. He succeeded._

Every single one of the Loyalists holds questions in their eyes when they look at him: about his scars, the last six months, the mark on his hand, about her. Samuel is the only one who holds none. He understands that some secrets are meant to be secrets. When the Heart tells him this, Corvo averts his eyes.

If Samuel wanted him to know, he would have told him himself.

III.

_He walks the floors, careful to touch each stone only once, counting. He cannot purge his mind of the thoughts._

There are many things to count in prison: scars, stones, notches on the wall, hours, regrets. There are many things to think about, as well. As Corvo watches Burrows pace the floor like a thing caged (thirteen steps one way and thirteen steps back, a similar length to the length of Corvo’s cell), something twists in his stomach. The man’s lips are moving and his head is bent forward and his knuckles are white. It is the pose of a man who has nothing to wait for but the executioner.

IV.

_We have both been here before._

He bends down and hovers his hand over the stone, as if touching a body that is not there anymore. The stones are very white. They scrubbed all the blood from them long ago. The stone of the memorial plaque is the color of an exposed rib. The wind cries around him. The sea beats against the rocks below as slow as a dying heartbeat.

He does not need reminding of this.

He will never need reminding of this.

V.

_Why have you brought me here? Am I to forgive this man for what he did?_

In his mind, in his dreams, Corvo has revisited the scene at the Tower  _so many times_  – the way the man who now paces before him had stepped out of the empty air, the way he’d been held and helpless by heretical magic and only  _watched_  –

He watches Daud, now, and he considers his hands. He knows they bear a mark like his; he finds his mind turning over the other similarities they bear. He wonders how much blood is coating them besides the blood of the Empress. He wonders how it compares to the blood on his own.

He stops using the Heart after that.

It is not Daud who needs to be forgiven.


	15. Questions (Esma Boyle's daughter, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esma Boyle's daughter and the Ladies Boyle, G. Written for the pantsipationproclamation on Tumblr, who requested Lydia or Waverly getting stuck babysitting her.

**Things Althea Boyle asked Auntie Waverly that Auntie Waverly never properly answered:**

“Why can’t I have more cookies?”

“If you all hate that man, why do we keep inviting him to parties?”

“What’s a Wall of Light for?”

“Is it true that there’s a place on a man’s head that if you shoot it, it will blow up?”

“What were you two doing in that closet?”

“Why don’t you have a bedtime?”

“What’s that piece of bone above the fireplace for?”

“If you hate that Mother drinks so much and gets so different in the evening, why do you let her?”

“Why do the servants keep leaving?”

“Why are you so angry all the time?”

“Why can’t I wear Mother’s necklace?”

“Why can’t I play with them?”

“Why is there blood on the steps, and why did Auntie Lydia make me promise not to tell you about it?”

“What’s a parliament?”

“What’s a snake-skinned frigid whore, and why did he call you one?”

“How does a railcar work?”

“Why did Mother say I won’t ever be let into the Academy?”

“What’s wrong with that man’s eyes?”

“Why’s Mother always at the tower?”

“Why are the flags so low?”

“What’s a regent?”

“If we glue the plate back together, do you think Mother will notice?”

“What’s a blockade, and what does it have to do with being out of chocolate?”

“Why Driscol?”

“Why boarding school?”

“When can I come home?”

“Why does everyone here say bad things about our family?”

“Why do your letters sound so scared?”

“Where’s Mother?”

“But why isn’t she ever coming back?”


	16. Recollect (Geoff Curnow/Unnamed Tyvian Solider, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geoff Curnow/Unnamed Tyvian Soldier, G. Written for pathopharmacology on Tumblr, who requested Curnow's thoughts upon waking up in the Holger Square dumpster.
> 
> (The Heart says of Curnow that "his first lover was a soldier from Tyvia. He killed to keep the secret.")

The last time his head was pounding this bad, he’d been stationed up in south Tyvia. It was a peacemaking position - some sort of effort to mix up Gristol and local forces and show the locals the Empire could be trusted - but he’d been young and scared and the city had been cold. The first time he went out without a few fellow Dunwall men around him, he’d wound up trying some of that local clear alcohol stuff. Then a  _lot_  of that local clear alcohol stuff. While men watched. And pounded on tables. He doesn’t know what it’s made from (he still doesn’t believe them when they tell him it’s potatoes). He still doesn’t know how much he had.

He’d woken up to a young soldier dumping a bucket of half-melted snow on his head and then coaxing him through coffee and breakfast in an effort to get him to morning inspection on time and keep him from losing his post. The memory is, unsurprisingly, spotty. He remembers that the snow down his back had been horrible. He remembers the coffee had been  _worse_. He remembers cursing a blue mile. He remembers that the tips had given out on the first two fingers of the soldier’s right glove, so that the frayed ends were a bit soft and scratchy when he touched Geoff’s face to keep him from nodding off again - he remembered  _that_ , but not the man’s name, and when he saw him two weeks later that was the  _second_  thing he asked.

The first was “why?”

The third was “so what’s your patrol route this week?”

It had been the harbinger of very bad things. It had been the harbinger of very, very  _good_  things. That had then become very bad things. That -

It’s all too much of a headache, and it’s compounding the one he actually  _has_. Geoff Curnow flops his head back against the side of the dumpster and winces at the resulting echoey clang. He’s got no idea how he got here, there’s a beefbone digging into his rear, it smells  _awful,_  there’s no snow, there’s no worried accented voice muttering that  _he’s got to get moving but it’s all going to be okay_  - and he’s really not sure, again, if this is the start of something very bad or very very good indeed.


	17. Bend All Your Notes For Me (Overseer & the Outsider, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Outsider and an Overseer, G. Written for rabbivole on Tumblr, who prompted the titular phrase.

He doesn’t board up the doors and windows to keep his Brothers out and keep himself from being burned as a heretic. Oh no. He does it to keep the music  _in_.

They’re liars. Or idiots. Or fools. Their perspective is backwards and shamefully limiting. The Outsider  _can_  be studied. He can be understood. He can, and he  _should be_. They can’t hope to fight him if they don’t know him -

(He will. He will. He will).

He plays a simple song on the organ, walks the scales up and down, and then compounds upon it. Plays every song they taught him in the Abbey and a hundred more besides, improvises, until he’s sweating and he notices that the pads of his fingers shine with blisters as white as the underbellies of fish, until the blisters pop, there’s blood on the keys and it smells like time and seawater - 

He takes the organ apart. Strips it down. Kisses the end of each reed. Works a little of the blood inside. Slips the charm of bone within. Re-builds it.

Plays again.

The notes are broken, now, twisted and bent. He can hear the bone clattering inside, somewhere, bathed and tossed around in the air that rushes over it. He cradles the instrument close to his heart. It screams like a dying whale. He wouldn’t have called it  _music_ , before, but he was an idiot fool. His perspective was shamefully limited. The sound of a dying whale is perfect. This is  _perfect_. If he wants to call the Outsider -

If he want to  _know_  the Outsider - 

(He will. He will. He will).

There are rats. They bite. He hasn’t had anything to eat in days. The wood on the windows is rotting. His hands shake. Their shaking on the organ rattles the song, heightens the disturbance in the Void, makes it  _better._

By day, he plays, and the notes crash around the little room. By night, he sleeps slumped over his wreck of an instrument. The blood dries on his fingers and on the keys and on his face leading down from his eyes. The music still echoes in the air. And the night is very dark, and the sea outside is very deep, and sometimes - only sometimes, only when he’s asleep and _cannot_  know - the sea begins to echo  _back_.


	18. Rantipole (Corvo, Daud & the Outsider, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo, Daud & the Outsider, G. Written for orbitoflove on Tumblr, who requested "rantipole: 1) a wild, romping young person 2) wild, rakish 3) to act like a wild young person."

I.

Sometimes he wonders if Emily is punishment for his own youth (before Jessamine, before Gristol, before he had any attackers to worry about other than the tiny crabs on the beaches that liked to nibble young boys’ toes). 

He doesn’t mind, really. He was like this at her age. It’s not actually a punishment, not even when she follows him on patrols so that she can learn all his hiding spots and then tries to  _use_  them when it’s time for geography lessons. Even when she asks for a wooden sword for her birthday. 

Of course Corvo gives it to her.

He hopes she never grows out of it.

II.

Daud is not reckless. Assassins can’t be reckless. A witch and her young son  _cannot_  be reckless. When he was a child and the other children knew his name and the mark on his mother’s skin and what it meant, he’d always found the fields strangely deserted when he went out to play. He’d chase his shadow through rows of lemon trees. Imagine hunting. Or being hunted. Climb the tops of hills and shade his eyes against the glare off distant army banners, or distant Overseer masks.

This is why it doesn’t sit well with him when the Whalers turn their training into games. This is  _not_  a game.

It never has been.

III.

He is the sea. He has always been wild.

He has always been  _everything._


	19. Invite Me (Corvo & the Whalers, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo & the Whalers, G. Written for petrichormint on Tumblr for the prompt "invite me."

Three days after it’s all over, Corvo picks his way back over the broken rooftops of the Flooded District. He finds them all scattered around one of the dormitories, lounging or slumped or pacing aimlessly, staring at empty mugs or sharpening knives or making halfhearted attempts at conversation. He’s startled by how young many of them are. Without their masks, they’re just a group of boys with terrifying powers. Without their leader, they’re nothing.

One of them  _shrieks_  when he blinks down from a skylight overhead.

Corvo stops time, calmly collects the crossbow bolts out of the air and lays them in a neat row on the shelf, and returns to his position with arms crossed. The smile on his face is faint yet surprisingly unstrained  Strictly speaking, he does  _not_  want to do this. But it’s necessary. He’s only one man, after all. He could fail her. He’s failed before. He can’t risk it again.

“I don’t trust the City Watch whatsoever,” says Corvo. He meets each of the Whalers’ eyes in turn. “I don’t trust you, either. But I know what you can do. Anyone wants to work under me as Honor Guard for the Empress, meet me at the Tower.”

And then he’s gone, and when time starts again he’s blinking away across rooftops to the distant uproar of startled sqabbling. Corvo sighs to himself. This was a foolish idea. He expects at most one or two of them to show up at Dunwall Tower the next morning.

He does not expect  _all_  of them.


	20. Quiet Me (Piero/Cecelia, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Piero/Cecelia, G. Written for gatsbygal on Tumblr for the prompt "quiet me."

“They’re gone,” he says miserably, for the fifth or fiftieth time.

“Yes,” agrees Cecelia.

“All of them, gone. _All of them_.”

“Yup. All of them.” She knocks her broom against the dustpan, and the litter that rains down makes a soft tinkling sound. It’ll be hell scrubbing the scorch marks from the floor and walls. She’ll tackle that after dinner. For now, she peers into the mess of broken glass and wisps of burnt paper in the dustpan and fishes out a scrap that’s got a few legible scribbles in between the burn marks. It’s the largest chunk of his notes that’s survived. “Er. Here?”

Piero takes one look at it, makes a sound that probably isn’t that different from the sound of a baby seal, and goes from sitting on the floor against the wall to slumped over. Cecelia can’t decide if he looks like he’s hung over, or merely five years old. “That’s nothing,” he complains. “Useless, insignificant - I spent _four years_ on the Door to Nowhere, now look where it’s got me -!”

“Nowhere?” Cecelia offers.

Piero tries very hard not to snigger.

“I heard that.”

“That was a _horrible_ pun.”

“Well, you laughed.” Her voice is matter-of-fact; she’s got no idea why she’s suddenly blushed a brilliant shade of red behind her freckles. Cecelia sighs and offers a hand to pull him to his feet. He doesn’t take it; he needs to _sulk_ more, but when he does get up it’s to putter off and find some sort of acid that eats through the scorch marks and saves her an hour of work, and that’s _better_.


	21. Unbind me (Corvo/Jessamine, T)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo Attano/Jessamine Kaldwin, T. Written for pathopharmacology on Tumblr for the prompt "unbind me."

I.

He’s just a boy. She’s just a girl. When he stands before the crowd in itchy clothes and swears to protect her with his dying breath, neither of them quite understand what it means. There’s a bet running among the nobility that Corvo will crack and beg her to be shipped back home before two years are out.

He doesn’t crack.

He would never,  _ever_  beg.

II.

Jessamine’s fond of novelties. Corvo’s fond of worming through holes in security that no one knew were there. She pounces on him one morning, baits him with this, and presents him with a Tyvian finger-trap of woven rushes. Corvo wanders around with his index fingers stuck together until one of the guards takes pity on him and explains it.

III.

He’s got no idea who taught her to tie knots like this. It certainly wasn’t him. It’s not the  _knots_  that interest him; it’s the way Jessamine laughs, low and teasing, hovers her body over the length of his as she murmurs half-meant little things about  _him being hers_. It’s true. She skates her fingers down his ribs and he arches on the bed. Her touch is  _wicked_. He doesn’t ask her to untie him. Not once.

IV.

The first time he begs her to change her plans, he bows. Low. Jessamine sucks in her breath, but before Corvo can voice all the reasons he should not be sent away she’s up and laying a hand on his shoulder and making him straighten. She tells him that he doesn’t need to be so formal with her. Her eyes and her bearing remind him that this is  _all_  a matter of formality, of position, that she is _Empress_ , that she has ordered and he must obey.

He begs her not to send him away many, many times after that. She never quite listens.

He never bows again.

V.

When they burn him and break him in prison and ask him to forswear his duty and her name, he doesn’t refuse them out of _pride_. He can’t.

Pride would imply it’s  _his choice_.


	22. Haunt Me (Treavor Pendleton & Wallace, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Treavor Pendleton and Wallace (sort of), G. Endgame. Written for child-of-drought and meltedcookies on Tumblr, who prompted "mourn me" and "haunt me," respectively.

Emily’s quiet. For now. The banging of tiny fists on the door has stopped, at least. Havelock’s vanished into another room, muttering about finding a better vintage. Martin’s taken to pacing the length of the great table, footsteps in perfect martial time to the ticking of the clock. He looks…  _resigned_.

Treavor will never understand that man.

Treavor isn’t resigned. Treavor is… many things, some of which don’t go well together (gleeful and proud and curiously  _sick_ ), but mostly what he is is _drunk._  He filled - no,  _Wallace_  filled his personal flask with very expensive whiskey before they left, he  _knows_  it was Wallace because he’d been busy. He’d finished his autobiography entry, yelled at Wallace to re-pack the bag, Wallace had come in with the whiskey, he’d reminded Wallace to clean his pistol and make sure it was loaded -

Treavor blinks at the table.

 _Tick-tock_  goes the clock. Amazing that Havelock isn’t back yet, really. They need to get on with this toasting-the-new-Empire business.  _Tick-tock._

“Will you  _stop_  that?” he snaps at Martin, as the man does a sharp turn at the far end of the table and begins to pace his way back up. “I don’t want to be rude, but your rhythm is off from the clock.” He frowns into the flask. Drinks. That’s better. “It’s distracting.”

(It’s very good whiskey, Treavor notes. It’s not suitable for snapping at people. It’s very suitable for a celebration. Like this one. Whoever picked it had excellent taste. Very thoughtful. Had he picked it? He had to).

Martin gives a flat, breathy chuckle. “Distracting,” he mutters. “Why, something  _bothering_  you?”

There’s something there he should pick up on, if he weren’t so warm. Treavor studies the table as if it has done him personal wrong. Lots of things have done him personal wrong; it’s not a stretch.  _Tick-tock. Tick-tock._  There’s something he needs to notice. Something  _important._  He shakes his head and mutters under his breath.

“The silver isn’t polished.”


	23. Vermin (Corvo & Ms. White, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo & Ms. White, G. Written erdbeerkotze on Tumblr noticed that Ms. White wears Jessamine's exact outfit, with the only difference being that her shirt is red not white (and the fly mask, of course)

There are rats skittering across the floors. Nobody talks about them. This is one of the nicest manors left in Dunwall, and the ladies who live her have given  _so much_  to this city including the crystal lights that are supposed to keep the rats away, and so bringing up the fact that those rat-lights aren’t infallible would be horribly bad taste.

Bad taste, Corvo is finding (as another woman titters at his mask), is only acceptable when it’s  _amusing_. Vermin aren’t supposed to be talked about. This means, apparently, that according to Dunwall’s aristocracy neither the man in the charmingly gauche skull mask nor the murderer Corvo Attano are vermin at all; their names and the danger and scandal buzzing around them are on everyone’s lips. Corvo’s not sure if he agrees with any of this. He turns from their stares, and he doesn’t shudder when a rat runs over his boot and hides under the banquet table. 

They are all vermin, here.

There are rats on the floor, and there are flies buzzing around the food - it’s only natural, the roast flounder’s been out for a few hours, the lesser courses for longer. There isn’t a smell. Not yet. Corvo imagines it all the same. He wanders through the mansion, and the rats don’t run from him, and the flies are  _everywhere_ , and when he sees a woman out of the corner of his eye his stomach jolts and he imagines the flies settling around her like a shroud.

And they talk about  _him_  having  _bad taste._

He shouldn’t be surprised that the cut and style of the clothes that Jessamine died in have, in these past six months, become  _fashionable_. But this -

It’s  _awful_.

It’s the same suit. The very same. The same shade of black (because black has different shades - oil-black, rat-black, fly-black). He knows the texture of that cloth under his fingers. He knows how it feels when it’s torn, too, how it feels when it’s warm wet.

It’s not her, because Jessamine almost never wore red, because the shirt she wore underneath had been  _white_  and the blood had been brilliant against the cloth and against her skin.

It’s not her, because he knows (knew?) her body, the way she stands (stood?), the way she looks off to the left and up when she’s thinking, the way she does not talk with her hands, and this woman is all wrong.

And her mask is a fly’s head, blown up beyond all reason, horrible and heavy. There’s something  _obscene_  about the way she’s watching him through those overlarge faceted eyes. Corvo recoils. He half-expects her voice to click and buzz like that of an insect when she asks him for a drink; worse, he half expects  _Jessamine’s_  voice to issue out from that awful mouth, for the red of her sleeves to darken with rivulets of further red, for -

When Corvo returns to the banquet table with an empty glass in hand, the flies rise and swirl and resettle on the body of the great fish. He has to pause and take a deep breath, has to try to ignore the scent of impending  _rot_ underneath all the perfume and pipe tobacco in the air. Decay. Rats stripping a body down to bone. Flies picking at a carcass. Jessamine waiting to be buried, still in a red-stained shirt, flies landing on her face, her lips, her eyes.

He touches the heart in his pocket, feels it shudder against his fingers, slick and soft and wet.

He goes to get Ms. White her drink.

It is no wonder there are so many vermin. They are all rotten here.


	24. Public Speaking (Corvo, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo, G. Written for pathopharmacology/ghostsoldier.
> 
> Alternate titles: "Corvo being the most suave he has ever been in his life," "Have you ever noticed that Corvo's written dialogue lines are really odd and rehearsed-sounding?"

Corvo has many regrets. Some of them can be fixed. Some of them cannot. Some of them are large ( _do not go to sea and leave her alone_ ). Some of them are small ( _do not allow Piero to show me the blueprints, do not ask why Martin is so nonchalant about black magic_ ). Some of them are neither, just… _important._

He should have spoken to Campbell.

He should have said something, commented about the irony about their positions being reversed, made the man _understand_ why he shoved him into the interrogation chair with such grim satisfaction. He should have told him _why_. He should have taken off his mask.

So this is why, the night before he head back to Dunwall Tower, Corvo’s standing alone in his room and staring into the mirror that he’s hung over the desk.

This mission is too important for him to have regrets. He is going to look into Hiram Burrows’s eye when he kills him. He is going to take off the damn mask, and he is going to look in the face of the man who took everything from him, and he’s going to _make him understand_ before he shoves a sword into his heart.

Except that Corvo has never been one for making big dramatic speeches.

He’s not one for speaking, period.

If he goes in there cold, unpracticed, with adrenaline and justice and rage beating in his ears, he’s going to screw it up, say something inadequate and stupid, and – well.

This mission is _too important_ for regrets.

Corvo studies his face in the mirror. He tries to look past the scars and the dark circles and see the face that Hiram will see, the one that fits the wanted posters, all vengeance. He wets his lips. “Remember me, Hiram?”

Dear sweet Outsider, he could _kick_ himself.

He cringes, turns away from the mirror, walks and aborted little circle around the room and then comes back. He has _no idea_ how Jessamine managed to give speeches. Practice. He needs to practice. Come up with something clever.

Okay.

“You should have known it would come to –“

 _Fuck_.

“I used to respect you, _she_ used to respect you, and –”

_Fuck, fuck, fuck._

(He thinks of Jessamine lying in a pool of blood)

“Having everything you worked for taken from you _hurts_ , doesn’t it?”

(Of Burrows saying _nothing personal)_

“You said it was nothing personal, Hiram. It was _all_ personal to me.”

(Of  the days and weeks in the torture chamber where they tried to tell him _it’s over_ and give up his very _name_ and say he’d killed her –)

“My name is Corvo Attano, you killed my Empress, prepare to die – Outsider’s _balls_ I can’t do this.” Corvo pinches the bridge of his nose. Runs a hand through his hair so that it stands on end. Waits a minute.

He drops the hand from his face. Okay. So he feels ridiculous. That’s fine. At the Tower, he won’t feel ridiculous. He looks in the mirror. He looks like hell, drawn and jittery, but there’s still a bit of the man he used to be peeking out of his eyes. He swallows hard and the sound fills the drafty room.

“You said I wasn’t Lord Protector anymore,” he says, quiet and level. “You said that since she was dead, there was nothing more I could do. You were wrong. That’s who I am, Hiram, you could _never_ take that from me. And I am _still_ protecting her. I –”

“Corvo? Who are you talking to in there?”

Corvo jumps back and almost trips over the bed. “No one!” he calls. Runs both hands through his hair and opens the door to find Emily standing there, blinking owlishly up at him. “No one. What’s up?”

She’s got questions about what life’s going to be like in the Tower and if she’ll have her old room back again ( _if you want)_ or if she’ll have Jessamine’s room ( _someday_ ) and who he was talking to _(no one) (Emily, stop) (sometimes adults talk to themselves) (my ears aren’t red, what are you talking about?)._ When she leaves, an hour later, Corvo locks the door behind her. He spends a moment just standing in the middle of the room. Blinking.

Okay. He can do this.

He feels inordinately foolish about it, but he goes and gets his  mask and puts it on and practices taking it off, glaring at his reflection on the mirror. “I’m still protecting her,” he tells himself, the mirror, Hiram Burrows. “I will _always_ protect her.”

The mask comes off smoothly and its weight is comfortable in his hand, and the words feel right, and he rehearses them late into the night. Tomorrow morning, he will return to Dunwall Tower, and he will say them for real. He gets one shot. He can’t mess it up. He can’t have any more regrets.


	25. Weeping (unnamed OC, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for an Anon on Tumblr, who prompted the first phrase.

There are a million wounds, but no pain - not now. It’s hard to remember what pain is, really. Or isn’t. It is hard to remember a lot of things.

There are rat-bites all over him, crescent-shaped and oozing yellow, but that makes no sense because the rats are all around him and and they aren’t biting now, are they?

He knows that’s a bad thing. He doesn’t know why. It’s hard to remember. It’s a complicated idea, has to do with complicated words like  _infection_ , and _infection_  doesn’t make sense when all he can think about is  _pain_  and  _doesn’t hurt_  and  _cold_  and  _help me, please, somebody help me._

He can’t explain why he needs help, though. The words evaporate from his tongue. It’s too complicated an idea. He can’t - 

There were laws. Complicated ones. Superior officers. Blame. Murder in the night. Court-martials. He can’t remember.

He stumbles through the alleyway, rats at his feet, hands a wet  _slap_ on gritty stone walls, and he thinks - he thinks in terms that are simple.  _Yellow_ oozing from rat-bitten wounds means bad things.  _Red_ on his fingertips when he wipes his face means bad things.  _Blue_ on his coat, coat that used to be blue - it’s Lower-watch blue, officer blue, if he’s in a blue officer’s coat why is he out here shivering with the  _yellow_ and the  _red?_ He’s supposed to have rations of elixir. All of them, all members of the watch had it. It was as  _red_ as his tears. Lifeblood. He’s supposed to -

He was supposed to guard the checkpoint. He was supposed to watch his men. It wasn’t a complicated idea. It wasn’t supposed to go wrong. He wasn’t supposed to wake up to his men being stuffed in bodybags and a  _blue_ ring of bruises around his throat, his fault, not his fault, he  _hadn’t seen anything_ , he wasn’t supposed to get fired, wasn’t supposed to have position and patrol and precious red lifeblood stripped from him, he’s not supposed to be falling to his knees in the gutter with the rats swarming over his boots.

He did his job perfectly, and there was nothing he could have done, and they  _still_ destroyed it all. Murdered. His rank and his honor and his name.

 _Honor_  is a complicated idea, though, and it flows away from him like water down a drain. He wretches. Yellow pus and vomit and red blood and blue, blue water slurrying away from him. His eyes burn. The pain is aching and so constant that it doesn’t even register as pain anymore. He curls into himself. He doesn’t understand much, but he understands that someone took _everything_  from him. There is nothing left of the man he used to be.


	26. Consider It A Gift (Corvo, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo, G. Written for Twigcollins on Tumblr, who requested Corvo receiving his powers in prison as in the launch trailer - complete with not being told how they work.

Corvo stares at his hand.

He stares at his hand for a long time.

He’s seen this mark, in Natural Philosophy books and alley walls both, and either there were some hallucinatory mold spores in that bread (not a stretch) or he’s just committed about eighteen kinds of blasphemy and he has  _no idea_ how.

He’d almost prefer if it were a hallucination. Almost. Not quite. He’s really not sure.

At the memory of the Outsider’s words sliding over him like rainwater, of the way he’d held his name in a mouth like a kiss, Corvo shivers and draws tight against the cell wall. It’s cold on bare skin. The air is colder still. He draws his left hand against him, and the mark on the back of that hand isn’t cold at all.

Execution tomorrow. Idiots cheering as his head hits the block. He’s too tired to even be afraid. He’s just…  _so tired_ , and when the Outsider had leaned in close and told him that  _this isn’t how he wants to end his life_  he’d wanted to laugh because it was so damn obvious. None of this is what he wants. He’s so far from what he wants that - 

There’s nothing they can do to him anymore.

Corvo thinks of this, as the drips of water mark the hours toward his execution, as the burn on his face throbs, as he shivers and traces the design on the back of his left hand with the thumbnail of his right.

Committing eighteen kinds of blasphemy means  _nothing_  when he’s got literally nothing left to lose.

He’s heard stories. Witches who could bend the wind to their will. Magicians who could blow doors off their hinges. He stares at the door to his cell, and he thinks of storms and breaking and escape, and, wildly, hopeful and terrified, he clenches his hand -

And he smacks straight into the iron door with a deafening  _clang_ , jars his teeth, and ends up lying on the floor of his cell with the world swimming all around him.

 _The Outsider must be laughing at me,_  Corvo thinks, before he passes out.  _I don’t think this is the kind of show he was expecting._


	27. At The End (Corvo & Emily, T)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo and Emily, T. Written for Empresskaldwin on Tumblr, who prompted the first line.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

His hands aren’t supposed to be slick with blood.

If it’s storming, it’s supposed to be wild, mad, lightning spearing across the sky and thunder rolling like a premonition of her rule to come. Not grey, not dreary, not awful.

Dunwall isn’t supposed to be burning in the distance.

His sword isn’t supposed to go clattering over the side and falling, and he’s not supposed to trip in his haste to get to her. And when he grabs her, it’s supposed to be with two hands, not one, because he’s her Protector and overbalancing and his life means nothing; and her nails aren’t supposed to dig into his skin, or if they do it isn’t supposed to hurt.

When he hugs her, Havelock’s blood isn’t supposed to stain her white clothes, and the red of it is supposed to horrify her and not make her set her jaw and nod.

But none of this matters at all. She’s  _safe_. Emily takes Corvo’s hand, and they walk down from the lighthouse with the awful rain and distant awful smoke swirling all around them, and she’s not supposed to wear blood like a badge. The walkways are not supposed to be slick with rain and red, are not supposed to sway beneath their steps; the sea is not supposed to be ragged and torn. When she speaks, the wind is not supposed to howl and carry the words away. The rain is not supposed to bleed into the nail-scratches on Corvo’s wrist and sting them.

They are not supposed to smile at the sight of so much death.

They do.


	28. An Understanding (Morgan & Custis Pendleton, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Pendleton twins, G. Written for Devilfuckingdickins on Tumblr, who requested fluff of these two.

They stopped doing birthday gifts a while ago. It was redundant. It was dull. Custis would get Morgan something he didn’t need but wanted (fine silk ties in the latest fashion, one year), Morgan would get Custis something he needed but didn’t want (fountain pens in a moleskin writing case, the next), and they’d have guests over, and the guests would be dull and so the two would only speak to each other, and the liquor would flow and neither would really quite remember what happened the next morning and really, what was the point of it all?

There is no point in presents, really. Presents for one twin would highlight and draw attention to the distinction between the two of them. Presents imply  _yours_  and  _mine_. Separation. This is absurd. The two of them live in a manor large enough to put the Boyles’ to shame (which feels larger as their wealth dwindles and the servants leave), and they can  _still_  close their eyes and tell where their twin stands from the opposite side of the house. It’s as instinctual as knowing their own shadow.

And so there are no presents. It’s not like they need more things, after all; the two of them have everything they ever desire. On the morning of their birthday the twins sleep late and have breakfast together in the parlor, and they laugh at each other’s jokes, and the coffee is very fragrant and the scones are very fine and the servants creep around them as they refill their cups and do not speak to break the sanctity of the two of them. There are no presents. There is no  _yours_. There is no  _mine_. There is only  _theirs_ , and  _everything_  in the world is theirs.


	29. In Preparation (Treavor Pendleton, Havelock & Martin, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Treavor Pendeton, Farley Havelock & Teague Martin, G.

I.

Treavor Pendleton’s preparations for the move to the lighthouse are meticulous. Once Corvo is safely disposed of and they can begin in earnest, he hands Wallace a list of things he will need shipped. At the top of the page it’s in precise alphabetical order; by the bottom, Treavor’s spelling and handwriting are worryingly loose, and the item “twelve bottles the 18-year Morley” has been amended to “eleven.”

The list does not include the portrait of him and the twins.

Treavor meant to return it to the manor. He really did. Wallace had even suggested putting it in the entryway so that Morgan and Custis could glower down at the guests that arrived in their fashionable black. Making it the centerpiece of public mourning. Presenting the Pendletons as a united front for the first time since… ever.

Treavor  _wanted_ to. Or meant to. But then someone would inevitably ask how he’d  _acquired_  the painting after Bunting had reported it stolen, and one of the Boyles would loudly comment on the title. And there was the matter of the _glowering_. There are already enough bad memories in his manor. The last thing he needs is the twins staring at him each time he comes home.

Maybe in a few months. Or years.  _Later_. Once Treavor’s made a name for himself that puts the twins’ to shame.

The portrait is still rolled up under the desk in his room at the pub. Gathering dust.

It’s not on the list. He means to deal with it personally. Perhaps he’ll have Samuel make a special trip to the manor. Perhaps he’ll burn it – still rolled-up, so that he won’t have to see his brothers’ faces twist and bubble and burn and melt (he dwells on the image, and amends the “eleven” on the list to “ten”). Either way, the portrait will not accompany him to Kingsparrow Lighthouse. This is a new age. This is his moment. He doesn’t need his brothers  _watching._

II.

Havelock has spent a week quizzing Callista on the things Emily will need for her brief stay in the lighthouse. He would use the things she has  _here,_ at the Hound Pits, but he can’t very well remove them without tipping off Callista. Besides. Emily deserves better.

He takes a moment out of finalizing blockade and security plans to prepare to keep a little Empress captive.

( _Briefly_ , of course)

She’ll need a room with a sturdy door.

A comfortable bed. Something more luxurious than her garret here.

Books. Proper ones. This stumps him for a while. Children’s books are hard to come by and Emily’s getting too old for them anyway. Havelock’s fairly sure that tales of noble princesses in towers and their death-defying rescuers are the last thing that  _any_ of them should be reading. He’s heard Martin speak of getting her books on history, economic theory, governance. But he’s not sure  _which_ books. Won’t Emily need tutors for all that? It’s all very beyond him.

In the end, he places a biography of her mother on the little Empress’s nightstand. It’s a bit cruel. It’s not he cruelest thing he’s done. The biography has a long, long chapter on how false and ruthless Corvo was (is), and it’s never too early for Emily to start learning the right story.

He puts a few stuffed animals next to the nightstand, as well. They’re old. Tattered.

A child-sized easel goes by the window.

They were just gathering dust in Havelock’s attic, and he doesn’t think his little brother would have minded.

III.

Martin makes no preparations for the trip to Kingsparrow Lighthouse. He knows exactly what this is. He knows how it will end.


	30. Table Manners (Corvo, Jessamine and Female OC, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo, Jessamine, and Leonora Percivel (my OC, Lady Protector to Emperor Euhorn Kaldwin), G. Written for twigcollins on tumblr, who prompted the first line.

“That’s not incompetence, Corvo, it’s a mystery. Shut up and eat your eels.”

Corvo does not particularly _like_  eels. He pushes them around on his plate. He’s fifteen, and clearly done with his last growth spurt; he’s just going to stay skinny, no matter what they feed him, he’s never going to have a frame that’s good for stopping a bullet. He chases a hunk of eel with a pea. “But there were guards,” he protests. “Look. It says ‘there were no windows, and an officer of the City Watch was posted outside the only door -‘”

Leonora deftly reaches over and sweeps the evening newspaper off the table. “The guard was vigilant the entire time and saw nothing,” she says. Her voice is crisp. She folds the paper. Crisply. It’s sunset, and the lines of her Royal Protector’s uniform are still crisp. It’s faintly daunting. “His record is good. Don’t worry about it.”

“But -“

Leonora raises a perfectly-groomed eyebrow, and Corvo ducks his head and goes back to pretending to finish his dinner.

“Maybe he was in the attic,” Jessamine pipes up. “I heard a story about a man who carved a hole in the floor of the attic so that he could see a woman when she was sleeping, and he lowered a thread down, and he ran a drop of poison down the thread. Just one drop, every day, every week, every month, for years and years and years until -“

“Does her majesty have an explanation for how the assassin slit his throat from the safety of the attic?”

“…Oh.” Jessamine frowns, then lights up like a firefly. “Maybe he -“

“The Overseers are looking into it,” chides Leonora, softly. “I see you haven’t finished your dinner either.”

“Father says the Overseers are a bunch of backwards stodgy fraidy-cats.”

“Your father’s advisors say differently.” A smile flits around the Lady Protector’s mouth. “Besides, your father also said he would abdicate and become a pirate off of Serkonos.”

Corvo and Jessamine both fight back giggles. Jessamine, at the image of Euhorn with a parrot and peg-leg; Corvo at the image of Leonora whapping him upside the head with a newspaper at the suggestion.

Leonora would make a terrifying pirate. She makes a terrifying  _everything._

“Why aren’t you with him right now?” Jessamine asks, with a glance at the clock in the corner.

Leonora frowns. Folds and unfolds the newspaper to an article on troop morale in Morley. “Your father has a headache. It’s been a bad week for the war.”

“Oh.” Jessamine blinks. “Okay. Can I be excused?”

“Have you finished your peas?”

“Can I give them to Corvo?”

“Yes.”

_“Hey -!”_

But the peas get dumped on his plate, and Jessamine is out the door with a giggle and a patter of feet down the hall, and at Leonora’s look Corvo sits back in his chair and does  _not_  give chase. He sets about stabbing one pea on each tine of his fork, methodically. “She can tell when you’re lying,” he mutters. “I don’t know how she does it, but she can.”

“Somedays that’s the best way to do my job,” says the Lady Protector quietly. “When she has her own children she’ll understand.”

Corvo’s stomach does a funny little flip at the idea of both of them grown up and Jessamine married and with children. He eats a tiny slice of eel. Glances around to make sure they’re not overheard. “He was coughing blood again, wasn’t he?”

Leonora takes a moment to answer. “The Tyvian says he’s fine,” she murmurs. “As long as he’s careful. He’s not dying.”

She stops, but the ‘ _yet’_  falls out of her mouth anyway and lands on Corvo’s plate somewhere amidst the mess of eels and bread and overcooked peas. Corvo stares at it. He’s not good with words, but he can try.

“That’s not incompetence,” he begins. “That’s…”

Leonora sighs and ruffles his hair so that he ducks his head and shuts up. “Finish your eels.”


	31. In Another Life (Various, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Various three-sentence AU ficlets, all originally posted on tumblr as part of an askbox meme.

**Corvo/Outsider. Puritan New England.**

When the masked minister drags him to the pyre, it’s not that Corvo wants to stop time; it’s not that he  _wants_ to turn into a blackbird and fly away over the startled witch-hungry crowd. It’s only that he doesn’t want to burn. They sailed over months and months’ of wild waters to find a land free from corruption and sin, but there was something that latched onto the bottom of the ship.

*****

**Daud/Corvo. Sci-fi military.**

The media keeps showing the wanted man’s face: Daud feels Corvo’s circuitry-etched scars and glowing eyes  _follow_  him all through the station, and he keeps his head down as he buys a ticket for a post on Serkonos II. It has to be his imagination that the scar down his cheek from the optical implant  _itches_. The entire military wants to know what happens when the only two upgraded men in the system finally meet, but Daud has no interest in finding out.

*****

**Corvo/Outsider. The Elder Scrolls.**

“Why didn’t you come before they chopped off  _her_  head?!” Corvo shouts (but does not  _Shout_ ), “why did you only save  _me?_ ”

 _“Krosis.”_  The being in Alduin’s skin huffs a laugh and folds his spiked wings, regarding the Dragonborn with eyes that glitter like the blackest of soul gems. “You think I saved you?”

*****

**Emily/Daud. Film Noir.**

She knows how this is supposed to go: she is supposed to saunter into the rich wood-panneled walls of his office, blow smoke and proposals and pleas in his face, click her heels upon the rotting floor. He is supposed to fold his gloved fingers and lean back behind his desk and tell her that yes, indeed, he is a beautiful monster who has done all that the papers accuse and more - but so is she, and she  _needs_  him. She knows how it is supposed to go; how lovely, then, that Emily is the one lounging behind the great wooden desk, and Daud is in the shadow of her door.

*****

**Jessamine/Burrows. American Civil War era.**

When he’s sent north on business, Burrows sees  _towers_ in truth: gleaming cities, roaring trains, wondrous factories, the future constructed in gleaming steel and bronze. This is the  _future_ ; the white plantation he returns to is stagnant, ancient, as faded as the wisteria flowers that Lady Jessamine wears in her hair. This is why, on a summer night with the fireflies thick in the air, he walks down the docks and finds the man named Daud.

*****

**Sokolov/Emily. Caveman times.**

“What is it?”

“I’m calling it… fire.”

_“Awesome.”_

*****

**Emily/Outsider. Medieval.**

She can hear Corvo’s warhorse cantering up the road from Camelot behind her, but for once she does not turn. She’s waited for rescue for so long that the _mortal_  sort of rescue doesn’t hold interest for her any longer. They told her that she would be safe if she never beheld the real world, only watched its reflection in the mirror as she weaved; but they never dreamed of the dangerous being that lived in the depths of the mirror itself and offers black magic and blacker desires.

*****

**Corvo/Jessamine. Wild West.**

Corvo takes a bullet in the shoulder for her and half-ducks, half-collapses behind his fallen horse, cursing a blue mile. Jessamine grabs the rifle out of his hands and blows off the sheriff’s head. It’s high time she did some protecting of her own.

*****

**Granny Rags/Outsider. On the Titanic.**

She is only a poor old woman, and so she lets the young man and his white-dressed little daughter get in the lifeboat in her place. Icewater licks at her heels and curls around her stocking feet like fingers. Her beautiful boy takes her hand in his glacier-cold one, and even though the deck tilts vertical under their feet they do not fall; and as the violins begin to play, he draws her inside to dance.

*****

**The Outsider. Cyberpunk.**

“Less than 0.1% of the ‘net is indexed on regular search engines,” he laughs. Out of the corner of his eye he can see one of them heating up the brand that’ll short everything out and leave him a twitching husk, but he’s got a bio-virus trigger in his glove and he’ll be dead before it gets to that; so he grins in his captors’ masked faces, cold and sick and wild. “You know how they used to write ‘here there be dragons’ on the blank parts of old maps?”

*****

**Cecelia/Wallace. Coffee Shop AU.**

Mr. Higgins comes to the shop in the early, early mornings, picks up a pound of their best beans for his masters, and stays for a very small and very strong espresso. Cecelia listens to him complain and belittle everything and everyone all through the morning rush. When he leaves, he doesn’t tip, but she never has to wipe his table down, either; it is always, somehow,  _spotless_.

*****

**The Boyle Sisters. Dragon Age (Wardens or Champions of Kirkwall).**

They sweep into the old Amell estate and breathe new life back into Kirkwall. The Captain of the Guard, the pirate queen, the runaway Warden, the exiled prince and more all count themselves among their dearest friends, and the Coterie and the noblity alike are in the Boyles’ pocket. And whenever the templars catch on and throw one of the three apostate sisters in the Gallows, the other two pull the strings to get her out. 

*****

**Corvo/Emily. MMORPG**

“We’ll re-start the raid tomorrow, Emily, it’s  _two hours_  past your bedtime.”

“But -!”

“And - HOW DID YOU GET AN EPIC MOUNT ALREADY?”

**Samuel/Corvo. Space Opera.**

Sameul is just glad he pilots the shuttle. Let Corvo worry about getting his mask clean from laser burns and his coat clean of blood and ichor, about the tinny voice of the Regent on the radio screaming about galactic regulations and order and a prison beyond the light of the farthest stars. Corvo causes firey explosions wherever he goes; Samuel’s just glad he can outrun them.

*****

**Outsider/Corvo. Macbeth.**

“Traditionally, it’s ‘fillet of a fenny snake,’” the Outsider says, perched on the lip of the cauldron and watching the Thane make a cautious, circling approach. He holds out a hand and shows Corvo her heart, couched in gears and wreathed in wires, still beating. “But I thought for you, we’d set the spell with something a little more… personal.”

*****

**Esma Boyle / her daughter. Modern day: Disney World.**

“Mom? Why are the pirates chasing that woman around the barrel chanting ‘we wants the redhead?’”

“Because they built this ride when I was your age and it’s high time they renovated it. Now - I know your aunts said you’re too young for roller coasters, but I won’t tell if you don’t!”

*****

**Daud/Martin. Assassin’s Creed.**

They both know that leaving feathers on their marks’ pillows or lingering to stain them with their lifeblood is stupid, overly poetic, impractical, ridiculous.

They do it anyway.

Daud pretends he doesn’t notice Martin murmuring the Strictures as he does.

*****

**Corvo/Jessamine. Golden Compass (daemons)**

Ever since Jessamine’s own daemon died under her wings, Sydän has been looking more and more sickly, bedraggled,  _wretched_. Corvo watches her pace the length of their cell, back and forth, and not a week goes by that she doesn’t lose another blue-black flight feather. He knows he’s far too old for his daemon to settle on a new shape, but he wonders.

*****

**Corvo/Jessamine. Bond film.**

He gets horribly red-faced and flustered when he tries to buy her a martini, but he knows his way around a gun well enough - specifically, how to disarm her of _hers_ , hold the cold muzzle to the small of her back as he apologizes that Burrows is watching and whispers the intel she needs into her ear. She doesn’t sleep with him until she’s done with her mission. She’s careful, and she’s been an agent for a long, long time; she knows how these things tend to go.

*****

**Dragon Age Crossover: Emily meets Isabela at sea.**

“We’ll drop you off at next port, and you can go back to whatever it is empresses do,” Isabela murmurs, reaching up to adjust Emily’s hands on the giant ships’ wheel.

“I’m Empress on  _land_ ,” Emily retorts, grinning, “but here I can be anything I want. Can I try on your fancy hat?”

*****

**Waverly Boyle. Firefly.**

Reavers do not exist. Still, when Waverly sheds her crisp-folded Alliance blues and greys and books passage on the old ship to see what the ragtag crew is _doing_  (and take a large cut of the bounty when they inevitably end up doing something  _illegal_ ), she hides a vial of poison in her pocket.

Reavers do not exist - but Waverly is a very good liar, and she’s very good at recognizing when her Alliance is the same.

*****

**Corvo. Psychological horror.**

“Corvo,” Emily asks, “w-why are you still wearing your mask?”

He touches his face.

He isn’t.

*****

**Lady Boyle. Mass Effect.**

Leaning out her window, Lydia has a perfect view of the upper floors of Dantius Towers and the bursts of gunfire that pepper the rooms like confetti, the swift dark shapes of people inside, the glass that shatters and glitters as it falls. Her hands, blue and delicately manicured, curl tight against the sill. It must be so exciting over there.

*****

**The Pendletons. Al Capone era.**

The girl appears out of the backroom blue-smoke haze and slides the twins’ drinks across the table, slides into Custis’s lap, drapes her bangled arms about his neck (the drinks are free, she is free; for them, everything at the ‘Cat is free). “Prudence got a tip,” she says into his ear, “Slackjaw’s boys are gonna try and hit your place tonight.”

“Don’t worry,” Custis drawls, “we moved all the goods to Treavor’s room.”

*****

**The Outsider. Mass Effect.**

The circuitry eating away at his skin is gleaming, many-hued blue (the color of deep space, the deep ocean), and it lets him  _hear_ things. When the Illusive Man sees himself shoot Admiral Anderson, soft laughter echoes inside his head.

It doesn’t sound like a Reaper at all.

*****

**Piero/Sokolov. Hogwarts.**

It’s the little Joplin first-year who speaks up, asking “but what if we counter with our  _own_  riddle and it can’t answer, will it explode?”

Anton is a Prefect; he doesn’t have time for these sorts of questions, and he grouses something about  _because magic that’s why_  and let’s them all into the airy Ravenclaw common room. He does not admit to anyone that, amidst the Potions experiments and prototype friend-or-foe Stunning Spell cloak under his bunk, he’s got pages of notes and research on the exact same topic.


	32. The Three Deaths of Timothy Brisby (Brisby/Lady Boyle, T)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brisby/Lady Boyle x3, T. Warnings for suicide, miscarriage, and abduction / imprisonment.

I.

The doctors said there would be no more children. They never said there would be no more pregnancies. Midway through, he comes home to his walled-in country estate and opens the lock and the lock and the lock to find her lying in a red, sticky pool.

The blood is already cold.

She is cold.

The cup of herb-scented tea on the nightstand is freezing, perfect cold.

Later, after the maids have cleaned up, he sits alone at the dining table in the dark, dark room until his dinner goes cold as well. He walks up to the attic, through the three locked doors, and stares at the shadowed rafters.

He calls for a rope.

II.

She likes to sing. He buys her new music. He buys her audiograph recordings. He buys her a harpsichord, and carries it up himself. He buys her everything she desires, so long as it can be kept in the confines of her small garret room.

When it begins to snow, the singing gives way to coughing. The coughing turns wet and hacking.

The doctor gives him excuses. The air is bad. There’s mold in the curtains (he burns them). There’s smoke in the rafters (he has them scrubbed). He pays thrice the usual fee and sends the man away. He takes his advice to the letter, except the advice to _please let her out._

One of the maids talks. When the doctor comes back again, there are watchmen at his back. Brisby waves coin and threats and more at them, but when one of the officers begins breaking down the locked door something snaps, _no no no_ catching in his throat like a sickness, and he lunges at him with sword drawn.

The guard turns and shoots him twice in the chest.

III.

She has a knife.

It’s all too fast. He’s twisting her wrist and his other hand is clawing at her mask and around her neck and the knife is in his side, his chest, sharp little bites. There is no screaming. There is no sound. The boat tips, slimy water sloshing in and soaking his shoes and then his coat as he slips and falls.

For a horrible moment, he thinks she’s drowned. He’s killed her. Then he sees her fingers curled over the edge of the boat, sharp little nails digging into the wood through her gloves.

Thank the Outsider.

They are the last thing he sees.


	33. In Another Life II (Various, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Various three-sentence AU ficlets, all originally posted on tumblr as part of an askbox meme.

**Corvo/Daud. Fallen London.**

He’s blinking across the rooftops of the most wretched part of Spite, so he almost misses the note: tiny, crammed between two chimneys, smelling of Prisoner’s Honey and all the accompanying lost dreams. It might say hello, or stay away, or any of a number of things; it says nothing.

Corvo stares at the sketch of the tattoo from a particular black-eyed Master of the Bazaar, and he does not move for a long time.

*****

**Lord Brisby/Lady Boyle. Romantic Comedy.**

“Thirty days,” his editor had said, “lock her in a room and down’t let her see the outside world for thirty days, and she’ll fall in love with you, trust me, some psychologist said so.”

Brisby listens to her off-key singing from the shower.

No magazine article is worth this.

*****

**Martin/Callista. Dragon Age.**

Metal creaks on metal as her uncle crosses his arms to block the door with guardsman’s plate. “Honestly,” sighs the visitor, “do you treat  _all_  her gentleman callers this way, or is it just me?”

Hands clasped tightly behind her back against the urge to cast, Callista peers around the corner despite herself - she’s never heard a templar  _snark_ before.

*****

**Piero/Cecelia. College AU.**

Professor Joplin is pretty sure that his TA is not supposed to have to clean up his students’ papers when he throws them to the floor in a fit of pique at their _idiocy;_ she’s  _certainly_ not supposed to have to wake him up when he’s apparently sleepwalked halfway across campus (again), muttering about vectors and imaginary dimensions and whalesong.

She’s got very striking red hair. He’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to follow it like a lantern-light as she leads him back to his office, either.

*****

**Daud as a fairy.**

His grandparents always told him never to dance in a fairy-ring, never to peer down a well in the dead of night, never forget to hang the rowan above the door and line the windows with sea-salt, never whisper their names name to a pair of mirrors, never visit the seaward cave during a new moon, never, never,  _never -_

The being that steps forth from the hollow under the hill is dressed in bonfire-red, and his face is scarred and his eyes are a wolf’s and his skin is inked over and over with tattoos; he smells of the sea and of blood and of things beyond the waking world, and he does not smile. But it’s not until he offers the boy a fairy-court’s mask of earth and black and oil, and offers a hand, that he  _believes_.

*****

**Corvo/Outsider. Corvo sees the Outsider's leviathan form.**

“What is  _that?”_ Geoff Curnow manages, watching the great, shimmering form pass far below their ship, faintly incandescent against the black backdrop of the deep ocean.

Corvo doesn’t answer; the answer can’t be a sane one, not when they’re this far from home, not when there’s  _bad news_  in his breast pocket and he swears he saw the whale _look_  at him with a fathomless black eye.

They need to get back to Dunwall, soon.

*****

**Daud/Treavor Pendleton. Candyland.**

“I thought the root beer candies would have alcohol in them,” Treavor mutters, kicking at the lollipops lining the path and looking around for Wallace for the umpteenth time, “or the  _buttered rum_  ones, at  _least._ ”

“I thought I told you to shut up,” Daud snaps. “Why is everything so damn _pink?”_

*****

**Corvo/Lady White. Sci-fi.**

It’s become fashionable for the Boyle’s to turn off the gravity for their grandest parties, so that the guests may drift amidst wine and music and each other just as the station drifts amidst the stars. Corvo is quite proud of himself when he manages to bring Miss Adelle her drink without spilling a single drop from its rotating, spherical glass.

She gives him the upstairs pass-key, and accuses him of trying to look up her skirt until his ears turn red.

*****

**Outsider/Granny Rags. The Outsider runs a brothel in Arthurian times.**

“We are but sixscore young virgins, dearie, all between the ages of sixteen and nineteen-and-a-half,” Vera singsongs, spinning around and around so that the stunned knight gets a very nice view as her white skirt flares up.  ”Would you like to go up and see the whale-shaped beacon? Our master likes payment in song, but we’re a little more… accommodating.”

*****

**Daud/Lord Brisby. Hollywood.**

Brisby comes to the studio bearing a briefcase of hard cash and some very impressive legal documents promising amnesty. Daud drums his fingers against the Best Director Oscar on his desk, puts his feet of up, puffs on his cigar a moment, and turns him down. He does many things, but snuff films are not one of them.

*****

**The Ladies Boyle. Reality Show.**

“ESMA!” Waverly shouts over the blare of Lydia’s latest pop hit, throwing down the newspaper so that her sister’s mascara-smeared face stares up at her from beneath the tabloid headlines, “I thought you were  _done_ with this blackout shit!”

“It gets us headlines,” Esma slurs, draped over the couch and still in the glittery remains of last night’s outfit. “That’s my  _job_  in this stupid family, right?”

*****

**Corvo/Daud. Pirates.**

His pistol’s soaked, so Daud throws it aside and goes for his cutlass as he grabs the rope to swing onto the Lord Protector’s ship.  _“Let’s see which of us the Outsider favors -!”_

An errant wave catches him in the face and smacks him back down onto the deck.

*****

**Outsider/Corvo. Prohibition-era.**

Corvo never sees his face - just eyes shining out of the smoke-wreathed shadows at the back of the varied bars they meet in,  _lit_ as if the man holds a coal in his cupped hands. He never learns his name, either; just drinks the sharp booze he offers and takes the list of names, and jobs, and things that must be done.

It never occurs to him to refuse.

*****

**Treavor Pendleton/Lydia. Heartwarming holiday special.**

Lydia adjusts the last sprig of holly on the fake turkey and slumps against the wall in triumphant exhaustion. The entire dinner is fake, the snow outside the windows is fake, the music pumped in through the announcements is seasonal and tinny and awful, and everyone’s requisite garish holiday clothes  _itch._

The only things in the room that are real and  _not_ for the benefit of the cameramen are the jokes and laughter going around the table, the cheerful fire in the hearth and - somehow - the matching warmth of Treavor’s smile.


	34. A Note Left (Daud & Corvo, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daud & Corvo, G. Slight warning for suicidal thoughts. Written for commandertavros on Tumblr, who prompted non-shippy "Daud and Corvo leave love notes in their belt purses, seeing if the other can steal them to read the note inside."

Daud stands at his desk, not reading the same pages he’s not read for the past couple hours, watching the sun slip down over the roofs of Rudshore and color the algae-green buildings all in red. It looks like their little base is on fire. Daud’s lips grow thin at the thought. It might as well be.

There’s no way Corvo won’t have escaped by now. A few half-rotten boards and a guard on the floor above wouldn’t be enough to hold Daud, so they weren’t enough to hold him, either. Daud turns the page of his book. Continues not reading.

He could have set Corvo up with a tethering, thrown him in the manacled chair that one of the men had hauled up from some crime boss’s basement, taken the mask, taken that clockwork heart that was  _freezing_  as a hunk of ice in the Wrenhaven when he’d touched it. He could have – he could have done lots of things.

Corvo can do lots of things, too.

He turns the page. The sun slips a shade lower against the chimneytops. When there comes a scream from outside the window, Daud does not look up. When there comes a cool tickle of salted air against his ear, he does not look up.

“You’re not preparing,” murmurs the Outsider.

“Go away.”

“He hates you more than words can say. It’s quite sharp. I can think of several explanations.”

“Go  _away.”_

The being sighs. “You’re better than this,” he says, with a shrug that Daud can  _feel_ if not see, and then he’s gone with a breath of cold wind and another distant scream from one of the men outside. Daud snorts. There’s no one to hear.

If Daud is  _better than this,_ then that must make the man who’s steadily climbing his way toward him very good indeed. Or very poor. He can’t tell anymore. It’s all crumbled like the roof above his head, gnawed away by water cold as death. Daud’s heard about Campbell’s brand, about the Pendleton twins, about Burrows’s confession thundering out across the water. It seems the former Lord Protector has a penchant for  _mercy_. Daud has little use for mercy. He is not particularly deserving of it.

Corvo can do lots of things, and none of them make  _sense_ , because if Daud were in Corvo’s shoes he’d have taken a ship out of Gristol the instant he got out of the damn prisons. Or murdered the Loyalists in their beds. Or… anything. Corvo is a bundle of tacked-together inconsistencies, and the stupid frozen heart in his breast pocket is somehow  _still beating,_ and  _mercy_  is not a word that has ever sat comfortably in Daud’s mouth, his hand, his mind.

If Daud were Corvo –

But he’s not. Or can’t be. Not anymore.

He picks up a pen. He puts it down. He picks it up again. He writes a short note in a very decisive hand before he can realize that this is  _stupid_ and toss the crumpled note into the sewer, leaving deep slashes on the page below. Stupid, stupid. It’s likely that Corvo will only read this while riffling through his corpse for spare bullets. It’s likely Corvo won’t read it at all. The idea of  _mercy_ tastes like the stagnant air here, awful and rotten oversweet and all he has.

He folds the note and puts it in his pocket, next to the charm that always seems to grant him smoother transversals (he hopes that Corvo uses it and breaks his neck). Rulfio marches through the glass doors, and he tells Daud what he already knows, and –

And Daud is a brittle lockbox of a man, all sharp corners and sharp lines, and he is  _certain_ of things, and as the sky colors orange like a flare he’s certain that the man who’s surely just outside the doors is going to kill him one way or another –

(perhaps he won’t)

There’s a noise in the corner. Ruffle of displaced air, flash of blue light. Daud does not look up.

He is certain that no one will  _care_ about the musings he puts down on audio tape, now, and that Corvo will never care about or receive the note he’s just written for him. He’s certain that the note is an insult. Or a compliment. One or the other.  _They are not the same._ He’s just not sure which.

_You will never be an assassin._

(perhaps it’s both).


	35. And All That's Left Is Black (Delilah, T)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Delilah Copperspoon, T. Written in response to [alearius' fantastic piece of art](http://alearius.tumblr.com/post/56013849630)

She has always loved roses.

The young soon-to-be-empress favors lilies, sleek and graceful and spare. White ones. They adorn the breakfast table and the dresser by the window in her child-sized room. One of the servants replaces them twice a week. Young Jessamine never has to see the petals droop, crumble, die.

Delilah thinks that the dying is the best part of flowers. She is an ordinary child who grows into a girl too thin and sharp and spare for men to call her lovely, and so she likes the way they turn from smallness to glory to smallness again. It is like the words they say at funerals, _nothing to nothing_. It is deeper, she thinks, than anything the not-empress is taught.

There are lilies on Jessamine’s breakfast table and old burnt crusts on Delilah’s, and in Jessamine’s world the rise and fall of empires is greater and more lovely than the rise of bread dough in the morning, and one of the girls grows beautiful and one of them grows terrible. Or perhaps both do. Separately. Charting the rise and fall of their own little worlds, no longer speaking as they once did.

Things change.

Delilah has always loved change.

She kneads, she bakes, she walks the shadows of the halls. She clambers down the seaward wall to watch the wild roses fight their way from the cracks in the rock and cuts herself on their salt-rimmed thorns. She watches the lilies on Jessamine’s tables replace and replace and replace themselves, watches the girl’s star rise and reminds herself that for every ascension there must be a falling and a tumbling down.

Bread is consumed. The nobles do not look at it twice, sweep the crumbs under the rug. It is not enough. She wants to create something more lasting. She wants to  _transform_  something.

She watches Anton Sokolov through straight dark lashes. She corners him and talks to him of color, of light, of the magic of things  _transforming_ under her hands. Marble giving way to a face; white staining its way toward a lovelier face. She is a thin blade of a woman with oil-fire in her eyes, and she has been given so little, and so she speaks to him of the need to take something in her own two hands and make it beautiful and  _changed_ and  _hers._

She asks for an apprenticeship. Firsts she begs, then she insists. Sokolov tells her no.

So she takes the  _no_ in her hands (and her mouth, and her body) and turns it into  _yes._

That night, tangled up in sheets, she dreams of walking through a garden of bone. Roses and roses and roses, sculpted out of ribs and scapula and skulls. Thorns made out of the tiny bones of the hand. All of the flowers are blue. The ground is wet. The sky above is rich with every color she has ever seen. She walks between the rows of bone, head high, and she picks a rose that is a deeper blue than anything that could exist in the waking world and tucks it behind her ear.

She walks straight to the center of the garden, and she does not look afraid.

The being who lives here is waiting for her in a shape of a young man who will never age or die at all. “What do you want, Delilah Copperspoon?” he asks, “to overshadow them all? You know that would only last a little while. For every ascension there must be a falling and a tumbling down. Shall I give you boring metaphors about the sweetness of the flowers and the kiss of their thorns?”

Delilah smiles.

The Outsider plucks the rose from her hair. His fingers are cold. She tries not to flinch. The flower withers and dies and crumbles to nothing at his touch, then bloom again, a year contained in an instant. He raises it toward her in a silent toast.

When he bites, the petals crumple, and a thorn snags his lower lip and dribbles something like oil or blood down his chin.

When she wakes, the taste in her mouth is green and sugar-sweet. Her lip is torn. The taste there is bitter. She licks the insides of her teeth, finds a scrap of blue stuck under her tongue.

Delilah gets to her feet and ignores the stinging of her lip and of her tattooed hand, and pads downstairs to the empty hollow of Sokolov’s house and the walls of his studio. She hauls out a fresh canvas. She uncorks every color she can reach. She picks up a brush.

Everything that grows must fade, and everything that reaches high must crash down, and there will come a day when the skies of the Void close to her and drain their color from her world and leave her only with the grey of death or worse. But until then (she thinks, outlining Jessamine’s distant face, delineating the line of age and time and change, wetting her own lips one more time to taste the bitter and the sweet), she will make such a  _rising._


	36. After (Corvo & Geoff Curnow, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo Attano & Geoff Curnow, G. Written in response to [fluffbutts' fantastic Fugue Feast In July gift!!](http://fluffbutts.tumblr.com/post/56389114111)

There are no bullet holes here.

The pub won’t reopen for another month, but the new owners have already scrubbed away the few scorch marks from Tallboys and replaced all the broken glass. The light shines golden through the roof. The brass taps gleam. And if the shadows are a little too clustered and dark, if Geoff’s footsteps echo in the hollowness of a too-large room - well. This is Dunwall. These are the spaces he’s used to. This is to be expected; this is the way things are.

The room is empty, empty, and the only wound or bullet hole is the man who stands behind the bar. His hair is ragged and his face is ragged and the scars on his hands rasp against the glass he holds and his uniform is the color of the shadows under the tables, deep whaleskin blue. It’s just another type of scar.

The Corvo of old would have looked up when Geoff entered. The Corvo who’d sailed with him around the Isles would have looked up, and he would have given a sheepish honest sort of grin, would have slid him a drink along the bar, and he wouldn’t be -

Geoff Curnow crosses the room, through the hollow space that should be filled with all the ghosts of customers, all the other ghosts between them. Corvo finally stirs when he leans against the bar. The Lord Protector’s eyes sidelong and wary and there are questions ricocheting around behind them. Conversations they need to have. Geoff holds his tongue. The ghosts in their room hold their shadow-blue tongues.

(Geoff is very familiar with ghosts, with grief, with the slump of the other man’s shoulders and the please not yet in the back of his eyes; ghosts are patient. Words like  _Holger_  and  _that day at the Tower_ , they will all have to wait.)

When it becomes clear that Geoff is not going to ask, or interrogate, or judge, Corvo’s frame unravels a bit. He fills a second glass. He slides it across the bar. It is the only noise in the empty room. Geoff imagines, or likes to imagine, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and he matches it, and they drink; and the easy silence of everyone who  _could be_  or  _should be_  fills the pub around them, and so they don’t have to speak for a long time.


	37. On Canvas (Delilah, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Delilah Copperspoon, G. Written before the Brigmore Witches DLC came out, in response to [Delilah's paintings](http://dishonored.tumblr.com/post/57723746940/delilahs-paintings-created-by-arkanes-from).

I. There is no color. Only the white spine colonnade of the path she intends to walk, the tree incinerating itself upwards. Things grow here.

II. She paints herself wreathed in thorns like armor, holding them like whips. Her shoulders are more square than the ones she sees in the mirror, her breasts at once fuller and eclipsed by the color she’s woven around herself. Only her eyes are the same.

III. Lurk appears out of nothing and will melt back into more nothing. Her face is loose and skeletal, and her eyes are dead.  She seems as a corpse about to sink beneath the Rushore waters. Fire curls behind her and a pendulum swings in her heart. Forward and back. Back and forward. Delilah is not sure, anymore, where it will stop.

IV. This is faintly blasphemous. This is the most true-to-life painting she has ever done. A wave curls at his hair, licks at his jaw and his temple. His eyebrows become seabird wings. The plane of his cheek has no form or line, just raw unlovely color. Shapes spiral off, fracture, fractal themselves. He is not looking at her. She paints a lighthouse-sign of reflected light in the curve of one eye, wonders what he would see if he was.

V. The Barrister is a stiff and grasping man, already aflame with the fumes of his own devising. His hands are picked out in sharp, dead-skin detail. All of him is dead. The blue scarab at his throat will need to be prized away from his corpse.

VI. The Void rips itself through her brush and through her room like a whirlpool. The paint cannot withstand so much light.

VII. There is no escape, here. The lines of the painting cluster in. Caged. She douses Daud in red, traps him in stiff, sharp, rigid things, nothing of nature or sea or softness about them. There are cracks in his skin. He has no eyes, he is hollow inside; she makes light bleed through the scar on his face and dreams of ripping it open.

VIII. There are flowers lifting to flight in her hair. There is a rat at her collar, lace at her throat, her mother’s stiff lace against her pulse. Hands reaching for her. Her own hands are become strange, one a woman’s and one a shadowed claw. There are chains coiled around her legs and she floats free and directionless in the Void. Her face is a child’s, slack, alien. The Empress is becoming a hundred different things, and color swirls around her and her eyes are empty, empty, empty -  Delilah paints her and smiles, imagines the view from behind them.


	38. I. Where have you strayed that destruction now comes behind you? (Female OC, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sister of the Oracular Order, G. Written in response to [cannedlaugh's art and musing about a Dishonored sequel centered around the Order.](http://cannedlaugh.tumblr.com/post/62797037240/the-more-i-think-about-a-dishonored-sequel)

"Did I see true?" Teresa asks.

She is still an initiate of the Order, and so she must ask, always. The sight of initiates is unpracticed and not always true. Many are prone to nightmares, flights of fancy, false visions sent by the Outsider. 

She holds her breath. Outside the Abbey walls, in the warm Serkonan sunlight, the birds in the trees hold theirs. The wind sighs, stills, waits.

"Yes," murmurs the elder sister, after a long moment. Her eyes are turned slightly toward the side, white as cockle-shells in her wrinkled face. They flicker. Teresa knows better than to ask what she is seeing. "Sadly, fortunately, yes."

* * * * * 

The Outsider will do his work in Morley, and so to Morley they will go. Teresa reads of it, furtively (for books are forbidden to those who will soon choose or be chosen to go blind). What she reads does not excite her. It fills her with a cold dread. Morley, the books say, is a cold hard land, and the cliff-faces are still scarred by bullet and shell. The grass is tufted and wild and the birds scream instead of sing and the sky and the sea are both grey as a dead thing. 

But she is the one who saw the initial vision of a woman in black walking a grey cold beach with the Outsider’s blue flames and shadows at her back. And so, she will go.

They find a ship. It is a Morley ship, small, a trader. The name  _Demeter_  on the hull is half eaten-away by barnacles. The captain does not  _want_ to take on two Sisters of the Order and the three Overseers to guard them; but the captain is a holy man, and the bronze frowns of the Overseers are not easily refused.

It is a slow journey. It goes slower than the captain would like and he apologizes for the circuitous route. He must avoid storms, he explains, and the pirates that are somehow his guests’ fault because they are  _Serkonan._

(When he says the last, he spits, and Teresa imagines pulling the man’s own sword from his sheathe and holding it to his throat until he apologized. Something like her brothers would have done. But this is just a fancy, not a vision. Her fingers twitch but do not move)

It is a slow, miserable journey. She and her Sister and her Overeer brothers stay below the decks, half-sick, so that the spray of the sea will not drench and corrode their holiness.

The storms come anyway.

Teresa is thrown from her bunk in the middle of the night by something in the water that  _hits_ the ship like an open hand. The crew is shouting. Wind howls around the little vessel. She can hear the waves beating and beating against the hull as she and her Sister and Brothers kneel, unsteady, in a circle on the floor and  _sing._ They sing all the proper songs, the ones that hurt her throat and make her head pound with the uncertainty of their rhythm. Water begins to slop around their legs. One of the Overseers has hit his head and is bleeding. The ship groans as if something is wrenching it apart.

There singing does nothing. It never has.

When the  _Demeter_  finally does wrench apart, the wall of their cabin shuddering open and the black sea rushing in, Teresa claws her way upward for the surface. She kicks off her shoes. Her mantle tangles around her throat and almost chokes her. She runs up, then climbs, then swims, half-blind, hands numb and seawater in her ears and nose and eyes - she breaks, breathes, and the storm hammers her back down again. She gets one flash of a vision of the ship split open in the water like a piece of rotten fruit, crewmen clinging to the wreckage, a wave or a pale leviathan like a wave rising over top them and one of the men  _shoots_ and the captain screams  _don’t_ and the man does anyway -

And then she is down, down, under the black, and the whale-oil from the fuel tanks  _sparks,_ and everything above her is blue fire.

There is salt in her eyes and she squeezes them shut. She does not know where the Overeers are, her blind Sister. If she looks down for them she will see the shape she saw in the wave looking back at her, and she will go blind. If she looks up, she will see the blue Void eating at the ship, and she will go  _blind._ She does not look. She swims toward shore.

* * * * *

She sits on the Morley beach with her clothes drying on her skin, facing the setting sun.

The  _Demeter_  was bound for Wynnedown, on the eastern coast. This is the western one. The land is at her back, and the ocean and far-away Gristol lie before her.

And the only thing that washed up on the shore besides her was a crate, sealed and waterproofed with pitch, that she had broken open to find munitions. Pistols, and bullets. Perfectly dry despite the sea, military-grade, scores of them in neat little rows like funerary urns.

Teresa turns one of them over in her hands, thinking.

If she closes her eyes, she will see a vision of where it was bound for. She will see the captain’s lying eyes; she will see him lying on the seafloor with squids nesting in their empty sockets. If she closes her eyes, she knows, she will see Gristol across the sea, its naval yards empty for the past five years after the plague, its harbors calm and unguarded. Morley is a cold, scarred land, and it has never taken well to the Oracular Order, because the Order looks to the future and Morley does not  _forget._

Teresa turns the pistol over and over in her hands, and shivers as she watches the  _Demeter_ burn on the horizon like an apparition or a premonition.

The Outsider will do his work in Morley, and so to Morley she has come. She is alone, but she still wears the clothes of the Oracular Order and she has seeing eyes to guide her to a town where these will be recognized. The gun, unlooked-for, finds its way into her belt. There are witches to be found. There is madness to be uprooted. There is a burning ship upon the horizon with treason within its belly who is pointed toward the wrong side of the sea, and perhaps this is the madness she was sent to find and to stopper; perhaps this was the  _fire_ she saw in her vision, another rebellion and another war.

Teresa stands. She brushes the sand from her blue-black habit. She fixes her veil. She turns her back upon the sea and tries to ignore the way she is shivering and walks inland - and so she does not see the way the sea licks away her footprints, the way she casts a second shadow  _behind_ her despite the setting sun in a shape that is not holy or human at all.


	39. II. Yet from one spark an entire city may burn (Female OC, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sister of the Oracular Order, G. Written in response to [more of cannedlaugh's art about an Order-centric sequel](http://cannedlaugh.tumblr.com/post/62886159518/something-quick-because-i-actually-died-when-i-saw) / as a continuation of the last drabble.

It’s an exquisite pistol. She’s spent enough time with Overseers and their hounds and their weaponry to know this much. It’s of Serkonan make. Morley has not been  _permitted_  to mass-produce weaponry of this grade, of this purpose, ever since the treaty that calmed the seas and set men talking  _treason_ late into the night

Her fingers shake when she touches it. When she loads it. When she unloads it, nervously, fretfully, a few night later in the attic of a farmhouse halfway to Caulkenny. Her fingers slip. She sends the blue-glowing bullets scattering across the dusty floor like children’s dice.

She is a Sister of the Oracular Order, and this is  _not_ a children’s game.

The pistol is her evidence. Her  _proof. This is what happened; this is what I know._ She gathers up the bullets, carefully; re-loads them, carefully. She cannot miss a single one.

Her fingers shake when she hides the gun between the folds of her mantle. When she touches it to reassure herself that it’s still there. When she takes it out. When she -

When she wipes the blood from her black gloves.

(He hadn’t been a witch. He hadn’t been a heretic, even though obstructing or harming or refusing her was  _heresy._ She’d seen no visions in the spray of blood on the wall, divined nothing from the arrangement of brain and bone.)

She burns the gloves, and there is a wild, mad moment when she wants to shove her hands in the fire and burn them too. They are still shaking - more, less,  _not as much_  as they should be.


	40. This is Halloween (Various, T)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Various three- (or more) sentence horror ficlets, all originally posted on Tumblr as part of an askbox meme on Halloween 2013.

**POV of one of the Whalers killed during House of Pleasure.**

You just want to get the mask off - you can’t  _breathe_ past the suffocating rubber and leather,  _you just want to get the mask off_ , but your limbs don’t seem to want to listen to you. They’d  _cracked_  in horrifying ways when the crossbow bolt had slammed into your knee and you’d tumbled off the gutter and the rocks and the pipes and into the alley, and now they won’t  _move_ below the jarring ground-glass pain in your spine. And you just want to get this  _stupid mask off_ but your fingers are scrabbling and useless and you can hear Weepers shuffling off to your left and your right and all around you and you can’t

you can’t

can’t -

*****

**Daud cuts off Corvo's hand when he takes his gear in the Flooded District.**

The worst part isn’t the pain (incessant, gnawing,  _burning_ ), but the nerve impulses still skittering down his arm. He can feel wood and paper against fingers that aren’t there any more, and he wants to close those fingers around a crossbow hilt or Daud’s throat, wants to  _reach_  for things as he climbs, wants to - 

Corvo pitches forward, vision doubling and tripling as his skin makes a shuddering attempt at shucking itself; across the Flooded District, Daud looks up to see the hand  _twitch_  on his desk, the Mark flaring gold, as a rat across the room curls up dead.

*****

**Corvo & Daud. Detective partners investigating Delilah.**

"See?" Daud rasps, mindful of Corvo’s knife scraping against his stubble, "proof enough for you?"

Corvo does not think to lower the knife as he stares at the wreckage: blood soaking the floor, metal girders twisted and torn like paper streamers, thorns piercing straight through concrete walls, and the shape in the middle that’s dressed all in tatters and sinew and green.

It doesn’t look like a woman anymore.

 *****

**Callista/Daud. The Outsider messing with them.**

Callista dreams of ashes and wakes up gasping, body curled in a taut little ball and fist pressed to her mouth. The little cottage is still around her. Daud is very still on the other side of the bed. Deep asleep. The windows flicker and ripple with shadows from the rain outside, but she can’t hear it past her heart beating in her ribs, and the light that comes in through the windows is soft and cobalt-blue.

She squeezes her eyes shut.

The air around their bed is still,  _stagnant,_ and it’s been six months since her uncle sent her a letter saying that Corvo had called off his search for the two of them. Six months that she’s slept through the nights and not woken with her old nightmares of funeral ash in her hair, her throat, her eyes. Not once.

And Daud at her side is very,  _very_ still.

She can hear the steady drip-drip-drip of liquid hitting the ceiling.

It’s only water.

She hopes it’s only water.

She hopes that she’s still dreaming.


End file.
